Terrestrial History, by Joe Mungo Reed, caught my eye with its heavy title and stark cover art. Its premise was just as intriguing, promising time travel and four generations within the same family as they dealt with climate change and the colonization of Mars. And while there are some really exciting ideas at play within the novel, galvanizing me to read further, by the end, I was frustrated and annoyed with the direction it took.
Hannah is a nuclear fusion scientist who has been laughed at and sectioned off for most of her life. When she is no longer wanted by the university, she travels to the north of Scotland to a cottage she and her husband purchased years ago. It’s not long before she is confronted by a young man in a space suit claiming to have travelled from a future where they have colonized Mars.That young man, Roban, is her great-grandchild. Meanwhile, Andrew, Hannah’s son, is making a play for political power as he rises through the parliamentary ranks within Scotland. His daughter, Kenzie, decides that it’s more practical to focus on the fusion energy her grandmother worked so diligently on. And when her experiment at the university fails, she turns to a source of funding her father is politically opposed to, that of Mr. Falk, a billionaire entrepreneur building an empire to take him and a select group of scientists to Mars to escape the climate hell Earth is spiraling into.
I’m going to spoil the character trajectories as I discuss my frustrations, so tread ahead at your own will if this one is on your list.
The book starts off strong, introducing the characters deliberately and allowing the various timelines to soak so that they have their own distinct feeling. Structurally, I had no problem keeping track of the various timelines. This was aided by the fact that each chapter lets you know the year that is currently on deck, and the point of view from which one is reading. Reed is also clear early on in setting up the various characters’ motivations and surroundings. The time travel element is kept pretty tame as well, so there isn’t room for confusion. I was intrigued by the restraint within the novel of exploring the concept of fusion and the problems it could actually solve. It grounded the stakes in a big way that allowed me to take in the story as it occurred without the narrative taking off. Terrestrial History also doesn’t waste time in outlining just how bad things are going to get. It made the characters feel like they lived in a world where their passion to save it felt justified and tangible, even if their ambitions were nebulous. I also felt that the character dynamics were well established, giving everyone unlikable attributes as well as sympathetic ones that made me care for their plights and chosen avenues of working on the problem. And finally, I really bought into the idea of fusion as a concept and thematic throughline, if not as a practical source of energy just around the corner.
But as the novel proceeded, I started to feel the doubts sink in about where it was headed. I will chalk this up to “my bad,” but I had totally forgotten there was going to be a time-travel element involved (partially because it is so underdeveloped). So when it appeared, I felt annoyed by the interdiction on my grounded examination of a family living through a climate catastrophe and the early stages of colonization. It didn’t really become a problem until later in the novel when an entire section is devoted to explaining how the time travel occurs, and I seriously considered if it was worth finishing the story. Mild spoilers follow immediately, so skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid them. Rabon finds a weird-looking meteor flying through the solar system and learns it has weird time properties that he somehow figures out how to use to go back in time. And that’s the climax of his story, after all of the really interesting stuff that happens on Mars. It may not have taken up that much space within the novel, but it felt like too much page time was spent detailing his plans to then just handwave and say “he did it.”
Another issue I had with the book is that while it sets up that some pretty bad stuff is going to go down, it doesn’t really engage with what that looks like in the day-to-day for the characters who actually live through it. Andrew’s sections are him running around campaigning, explaining to himself and those around him that he has grand plans. It’s peppered through with lip service to programs that could help prepare people for the coming storms and complications, but it doesn’t really seem all that interested in the problems at hand. His sections tend to focus on his deteriorating relationship with his daughter as she works for the man planning to leave Earth in its time of need, further exacerbated by her choice to join them and take whatever fusion technology she develops with her. The bits where it does focus on his drive to do the right thing are always undercut by HumanityTM being shitty and not willing to rise to the occasion. This is probably more of a me thing because I spend so much time reading about solutions and the kinds of people trying to implement them on local, statewide, national, and global scales that the gestures towards solutions in the book felt lazy and as if there was zero interest in exploring the effort that would be necessary to stall the worst effects.
Kenzie’s section was the second most interesting because she had to grapple with the hard realities of her ambitions. Universities only have so many resources, especially in a disintegrating social environment. She knows she can put everything into this one silver bullet and hopes that Falk, the billionaire funding her, is willing to share. Her wife becomes increasingly paralyzed by panic induced by the flooding Scotland incurs when a rain storm doesn’t let up for five weeks, influencing Kenzie to apply for a Mars escape ticket. Unfortunately, I found her sections a little too tidy to really feel her fears.
And I think that was one of the main problems I started having with Terrestrial History. Everything felt really tidy and neat when it came to the direction of the relationships and the global problems they revolved around. Every single character, with the exception of Roban, was a misanthropic workaholic who was unable to connect with their own family due to their obsession. The fact that three-quarters of the book was also devoted to the search for a working fusion reactor to change the fate of the world was cloying. Especially when the one POV it was juxtaposed against kept repeating “we have the solutions now,” being responded to with “yeah? What are they?” and just failing to commit to engaging with those solutions. Instead, there is a whole argument about whether it would be moral to have eco fascists vote on the same proposals as the idealistic Andrew, even if they weren’t in coalition with them. And his one “good” campaign interaction was with a groundskeeper for the famed St. Andrew’s golf course and how he plans to protect it. It just left a bad taste in my mouth, having lived through decades of “we need a technical fix for a societal issue,” while working in a section of the technical fix industry.
The most interesting POV, besides the time travel shenanigans at the end of it, is Roban’s. He is a child born on Mars, and his body, along with many of the first-gen children, is having a rough time adapting to the low gravity, low nutrition, and lack of light. He practically exists in an exosuit to support his frail frame. Friends of his die young because their bodies aren’t able to cope, having evolved to live on Earth. Most of his accomplishments feel worthless, in service to a corporation with a very limited scope of terraforming Mars, something even they admit is a centuries-long project. His every moment is surveilled by the Falk corporation. Every accomplishment is owned by them. Even his vocabulary is stunted because of the sterile environments and the corporate speak he was raised on. These are legitimately the best-written sections because the language used by Reed adapts to his conditions. His own isolation is extreme; he exists in an exosuit where people interact with an avatar of his face displayed on a screen. He doesn’t even really know the touch of a person throughout his entire existence. It is a genuinely sad fate that it’s no wonder he decides to leave Mars for an earlier Earth.
One of the things I encountered when reading other reviews of this book is the fascination with it as an eulogy for a dying Earth. This idea can most likely be found within the two book end time lines, Hannah and Roban, as they offer the most details on what will be missed, and the kind of life that would be lived in a Martian habitat. But honestly, I don’t really buy it; it feels like a projection. Conceptually, it’s an annoying concept given that in the geological history of the planet, this massive shift in climate has occurred many times, leading to five great extinction events. Earth isn’t dying so much as we are snuffing ourselves out along with the animals and plants that we have co-evolved with over millennia. It’s a tragedy, no doubt, one that animates me greatly. But Terrestrial History doesn’t really capture that feeling as much as rely on it for its own emotional weight, and that frustrates me.
A small part of me wants to leave y’all with a sharp analogy about fusion technology and its failure to produce more than what is supplied, but I don’t want this to be a pithy holier-than-thou review. I know this is “just a book,” but it’s a book that engages in a discussion I think about every day, and it falls short in a way I find annoying because it just feels like it wants to half-assedly engage with this massive problem bursting in from the future. Terrestrial History is a disappointment to me because it felt so grounded in the beginning, ready to engage with some of the hard realities we are facing and will continue to face for the rest of our lives. Instead, it muses on the problem while navel-gazing about people who work in fusion who are unable to connect with the things worth fighting for.
Rating: Terrestrial History – A promising idea that misses meaningful follow through
-Alex
Good morning, Alex. I just finished Terrestrial History last night. I was left unsatisfied with the massively anti-climactic (maybe it should be anti-climatic? – ha) ending. So I went searching to see if I missed something, which included stumbling upon your review. Ultimately I arrived at this simple analysis: It seems that Reed’s focus is the efficacy of family dynamics (in the context of Terrestrial Collapse); a look at how individual choices ripple outward to impact family dynamics at the small end of the scale, and life as we know it at the big end of the scale. I think that this explains away a lot of the complaint, on which you penned, about the lack of attention to big, serious issues, and all of the complexities therein; these concerns are just a gray backdrop for his story. The fact that the characters lives are wholly given over, in one form or another, to pursuits that are in response to Terrestrial Collapse feels intentionally heavy-handed because it suits the emotional tensions and family dynamics that he wants to explore vis-a-vis this story.
Anyway, all of that said, I was not looking for an ending that saved Earth, or Mars, or doomed Mars, or further explained a time travel anamoly…I was looking for a more robust and emotionally poignant perspective from the four protagonists. The story ends with Roban’s timeline just before he dies, effectively filling-in each of the characters inter-connected timelines (yawn) in a matter of fact way; it felt like the format of the jumping storylines dictated the necessary infill of the last chapter. For example, I get that Hannah’s last moment of story glory is the food cache that she left for Andrew. And that is it? Here is whiskey to numb yourself to what is coming, and for which I will be gone when it arrives? So resignation and cynicism by way of (impossibly and) remarkably dry basement supplies (I’m growling like Roy Kent from Ted Lasso, possibly while saying, “fuuuucccckkkkk”). I think an appeal of the book was the first person ruminations that drove character development and drew the reader into each of these four stories. And after Reed got my attention, he crafted a slow build of tension that ended with a remarkably loud fizzle. So we have an author that chose to stay exactly inside the lines of the snapshot in (bent) time that examines these four lives, in the context of Terrestrial Collapse, and the platform that Reed developed in the first half to three quarters of the book – the four distinct first person voices, are not used to give the story arc (and reader) conclusions that have weight? Perhaps that is the point: The biggest event of the book (Roban’s death) happens well before the books end (the very definition of anti-climactic). Additionally, it does not seem that any character leverages their first-person voice for a dramatic or profound conclusion. There was a numbness or sedation to how I felt finishing the book. Maybe that is Reed’s commentary: We are all numb to what is happening right under our noses? Maybe this is the most passive-aggressive call to engage climate change activities that we have yet seen? Or maybe it is an idea for a story that simply reached its apogee during the sales pitch. Much like Hannah’s life’s work in boxes in the basement, I suspect that this book will find itself in a cardboard casket in my attic hoping that time will somehow provide solutions the Climactic Collapse. For good measure, I will put a bottle of whiskey in that box, too.
Thank you for your thoughtful writings. Keep up the work
Cheers,
Soren