Latest news with #TerrestrialHistory
Boston Globe
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In Reed's ‘Terrestrial History,' homesick for an abandoned Earth
The book begins in an all-too-familiar present. 'It was 2025,' Reed writes, 'another summer of climate breakdown. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Over 40 years later, Hannah's son Andrew has grown up to become a politician, desperately trying to hold the world together amid growing civil unrest and increasingly unpredictable weather. He is skeptical of his mother's technological pipe dreams, putting his faith in our ability to solve the crisis through collective action. 'Our diminished world is still enough if we work together,' he avers, 'if we share.' Advertisement His daughter, Kenzie, is not so sure. An engineer, she has successfully taken up her grandmother's mantle; by this point, however, most believe the Earth is too far gone for Hannah's reactor to make a difference. Instead, it becomes the centerpiece of a plan to escape the failing Earth for In 2079, Kenzie abandons Earth for a Martian colony led by the celebrity industrialist Axel Faulk, a man she admires for his 'cold foresight.' But the colony proves to be less than advertised, and she is disillusioned by the constraints of her new life. Faulk runs it like a corporation; its residents are treated like employees rather than citizens. By the early 22nd century, Kenzie's Martian son, Roban, has grown deeply resentful of the colony's soft totalitarianism and dreams of striking out on his own in search of a life that's about more than mere survival. Advertisement Each of these characters tells their own story in four distinct, yet intricately braided narratives. Reed sweeps you back and forth in time from chapter to chapter, illustrating how the past, present, and future are often imperceptibly in dialogue with one another. His style is diaristic, giving readers access to his characters' innermost thoughts. This allows us to empathize with them as they struggle to explain themselves to one another and fail to bridge the philosophical chasms that divide them. While the occasionally loopy sci-fi conceits of Hannah and Roban's stories drive much of the book's action, it's the emotionally fraught, contemplative tone of Andrew and Kenzie's stories that forms the true heart of the book. Reed never lets you forget that this is, most importantly, a story about people. With 'Terrestrial History,' Reed deftly taps into our present anxieties, not just that of our worsening climate, but of our worsening relationship to one another. In these trying times, it's easy to let cynicism take hold — to imagine it easier to leave the planet than to find common ground with someone who holds beliefs different from our own; to fantasize about some quick-fix tech solution rather than rethink our expectations around material culture and personal comfort; to think our problems are so large and so deeply rooted that nothing short of reversing the arrow of time could solve them. But the key to building a sustainable, prosperous future for humanity lies in confronting these Earthly challenges and uprooting the pernicious, zero-sum thinking that pits us against one another. While setting out to colonize the universe might on its face seem to be a bold endeavor or a triumph of human ingenuity, 'Terrestrial History' suggests that it is in fact a failure of our collective imagination and a distraction from the real work of knitting our tattered social fabric back together, starting with those closest to us. Advertisement TERRESTRIAL HISTORY By Joe Mungo Reed Norton, 256 pages, $29.99 Michael Patrick Brady is a book critic from Boston. He can be reached at mike@
Washington Post
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In ‘Terrestrial History,' humans head for Mars
In 2012, I took my 6-year-old twins to a space-exploration exhibition at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. A gallery highlighted Mars: solar-panel technologies, rovers in dioramas, even a display on 'terraforming,' the intricate, lengthy process by which humanity would transform a cold, dusty, oxygen-starved sphere into an Earthlike Eden. A life-size astronaut knelt on a boulder, its torso and visor hollowed out; each boy scrambled inside the suit, posing as I snapped photos. Today they're college students. Time flies! I recalled that afternoon while reading Joe Mungo Reed's lyrical, heady 'Terrestrial History,' which skitters amid the coming century and four generations of a family to reveal a world in crisis and a desperate colonization of the Red Planet. (The novel's structure nods to a quote from an Albert Einstein letter: 'the difference between past, present, and future is only a 'stubbornly persistent illusion.'') In the summer of 2025, Hannah, a physicist, leaves her husband and young son in Edinburgh and travels to a remote island off the northern coast of Scotland, where she mulls the mechanisms of fusion reactors. Her sole company is her dog, Jasper, who joins her on sunset walks along the craggy beach near her cottage. One evening she sees a flash in the sky, an eight-foot-tall spacesuit emerging from the waves. An image of a freckled child's face glows within the visor. A visitor from 2110, he knows who she is, has come to tell her about her own future research so that they may stave off a climate apocalypse. Hannah's taken aback. 'I'm not the kind of person to tell a story like this,' she notes. 'I've always been irritated by mysticism, by blithe statements about inexplicable phenomena. At dinner parties, say, when people start to recount spooky, inexplicable events, I'm the one with their teeth gritted, calculating privately the way in which the experience being spoken of could be accounted for by suggestion, by mist, by a bird loose in the attic, by strong painkillers.' Yet in the blue dusk she's a true believer, escorting him to a stone shed where they'll work. Reed then plaits in other narratives, set decades later: Andrew, Hannah's widowed son and a rising progressive politician; Kenzie, his aloof daughter and math prodigy who finds love with Justine as they collaborate on a Mars project for a ruthless entrepreneur; and Roban, Kenzie and Justine's sickly boy, born and raised in a far-flung community and longing for an Earth he's never known. There's no place like Home, the Martian Colony's term for the mother planet. The migrant cohort, known as Homers, mourn the everyday pleasures lost, 'the games, the sayings, the funny voices.' Their children, the First Gens, painfully adapt to low gravity and atypical diets and movement, with 'surgeries to help our joints bond properly,' Roban says, and 'bone supplements and courses of hormone therapies to promote growth.' The Colony shuttles among modules and 'transitways.' They mine the ruddy cliffs outside. Reed leans into world-building, conjuring 22nd-century life on the fourth rock from the sun. In 2057, Andrew and his daughter struggle to salve their volatile relationship, seeking refuge on the island as Hannah attends to her notebooks and calculations. Reed writes a quicksilver line: 'When we reach the open sea the water is dark, rougher. The wake of the ferry is wide and flat, like a thumbprint dragged across butter.' As the impact of climate change spreads, as wars immolate nations, both Andrew and Kenzie feel compelled to act. He challenges an incumbent for First Minister, canvassing the country, including its renowned St. Andrews resort: 'This is the first golf course, after all: the template from which others are made, so that now simulacra of this link land outside this small Scottish city are peppered over the whole globe, in deserts, on mountainsides, in swampland and tundra. A strange, nostalgic, colonial impulse . . . the making, the mastery of the land, is part of the point.' Kenzie opts for a job at Tevat, run by Axel Faulk, a renegade mogul and expatriate American. Faulk makes her an offer she can't refuse. 'The difference between my and Dad's responses lies in our perspectives,' she opines. 'He, a moralist at heart, is only appalled. I am an admirer of systems. I can't help but be thrilled by their cold foresight.' As Reed suggests, the future is now. For a slender book, 'Terrestrial History' delivers an enthralling plot; complex, realized characters; and a wealth of fine-cut sentences. Reed's great theme is Time, how our species is a microscopic blip in the biosphere's 3.5 billion years. Can the arrow of chronology shoot off in various directions simultaneously? There are shout-outs to Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Sir Isaac Newton. The novel plays with the motif of an hourglass — how Roban and other First Gens are grains trickling through the pinch — and also Hannah's wristwatch, now an heirloom (and an allusion to Quentin Compson's broken watch in 'The Sound and the Fury'). The book closes with a wrenching crescendo, positing that time itself splinters, ambiguous, our fates 'just a symptom. The result of a larger failure.' Writers as diverse as Chang-rae Lee, Jennifer Egan and Ali Smith have circled around a pair of perplexing questions: What does the near-future wish to tell us? And can we save ourselves? 'Terrestrial History' is Joe Mungo Reed's piercing, poetic answer. This summer we are all Hannah, poised on a beach, glimpsing a flash in the sky and staring, astonished, as a figure in a spacesuit staggers from the sea. Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of 'This Boy's Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.' He lives in Brooklyn. By Joe Mungo Reed W.W. Norton. 256 pp. $29.99
