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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@