Excerpt from Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When I have finished my noodles and Mum has given up on her own, we clean up together. I lean against the counter rinsing things, and she stacks the washer. She says, "You can have your sawmill music on," and I must query sawmill, because it isn't a word that's familiar to me. I realise that it has to do with the preparation of wood, which they used to use at scale in the production of buildings back on Home. Mum comes over to me as I sit at my screen and together we watch an ancient video, similarly mesmerised, in which a tree trunk comes down a line of whirring circular blades, being shorn of its brown outer skin (its bark) and sliced and turned and cut until the huge tree has become a series of uniformly shaped beams that trundle off the end of the conveyor belt, clacking together gloriously as they fall into a stack.


I am always early to school, because I wake at the same time as Mum, who likes to be at work in her lab before her colleagues.

I go to school at school number three. I am in the fourth school intake of the Colony. I was born at the end of the second M-year, after the Great Generation Gap. The GGG is another thing that preoccupies Mum. Often, she says, "You don't know how to be children."

No kids travelled on the transports after the Terrestrial Collapse, so the youngest person here, before anyone started having kids, was twenty-five Earth years old. There is a gulf between us and our parents.

For Mum, this is a problem. "We've lost the culture of childhood," she says. "The games, the sayings, the funny voices ..." I don't agree, because, thanks to the digital archives, we have better access to Terrestrial Culture than any generation before. I can watch all the movies that Mum watched when she was my age, read all the books that she loved. She insists we miss simpler things—little phrases and gestures passed in emulation—and maybe she is right. Yet is it bad that we are growing up quickly? We are not just any children, but those living in the middle of the hourglass, some of the few thousands alive after the loss of so much humanity, amongst the few custodians of our species preparing the way for the Great Repopulation when this place is terraformed and when other habitable planets have been located. I want to be doing something real already, not playing, not mimicking.

Excerpted from Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed. Copyright © 2025 by Joe Mungo Reed. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.