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A Novel
by Joe Mungo Reed
Book Reviewed by:A family saga following four generations on a time-bending journey from coastal Scotland to a colony on Mars.
Hannah is a fusion scientist working in a cottage off the coast of Scotland when she's approached by a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backward through time to intervene in the fate of a warming planet.
Roban lives in the Colony, a sterile outpost of civilization, where he longs for the wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face down an uncertain future. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph. For his rationalist daughter Kenzie, such idealism is not enough to keep the rising floods at bay, so she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond.
In exploring the question "What if you could come back to the past and somehow change it with technology?" Joe Mungo Reed has written an immersive story of hope, hubris, and sacrifice in the face of a frighteningly precarious present.
My teachers at school have said that my phrasal dictionary is a fitting tribute to life in the Colony, while my mother, who is laconic, said that the dictionary is yet more proof that I am worryingly precocious. "I was just playing with dinosaur toys when I was your age," she told me. Though later, when she was being sincere, she said that she understands my dictionary, my need to gain a solid grasp of this strange world.
Really, I prefer it when she is being laconic because the sincerity makes me think of her worries for me, of whispered conversations spoken beyond my earshot in institutional settings. She frets for me, for difficulties of mine that she thinks extend beyond those problems that other children of my generation have. Mostly, I think, she is projecting. That is psychological terminology that describes the way that she imagines her own problems to be mine. My Other Mum died in a mine collapse when I was three, and Mum still misses her and expresses loneliness by talking to...
A collision of past, present, and future, Terrestrial History is a sweeping novel that traces the work of the generations of Hannah's family from contemporary life through the Earth's total environmental breakdown, and all the way up into the vastness of mysterious space. Joe Mungo Reed juggles these four without a hitch. Each chapter is dedicated to one character and, even if there is a decade or century between them, each builds seamlessly on the last to depict the events of Earth's environmental crisis. I appreciated reading about the characters' lives and personalities. Reed's writing style is highly expressive with each character's interiority, as well as with descriptions of scenery. I was enamored of the green cliffs and beaches at Hannah's cottage on the Western Isles and fascinated by the dry, endless landscape of Mars...continued
Full Review
(722 words)
(Reviewed by Frankie Martinez).
Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
Terrestrial History is many things: an intimate family story, an ambitious novel of ideas, a poignant parable of human striving, and an intricately imagined climate fiction. Joe Mungo Reed writes beautiful, precise prose; every sentence is glorious. I have never read such a tender elegy for our planet. Joy Williams, author of Harrow and The Visiting Privilege
Science Fiction, lyrical lament, generational fissures, apocalyptic reality… this is a novel that strikes all the notes. Terrestrial History is smart, engrossing, devastating, and brought to an impeccable finish.
Joe Mungo Reed's novel Terrestrial History begins with a fusion scientist named Hannah, who has retreated to her cottage in the Scottish Western Isles to finish a review of "computing challenges in confinement models." Upon reading this, I realized I had no idea what it meant to be a fusion scientist, what a "confinement model" would be, or even what fusion actually is. I felt the urge to google.
The word "fusion" has many meanings, but in Terrestrial History it refers to the process of nuclear fusion, where two lighter-weight nuclei collide, resulting in both a heavier, bonded nucleus and, more importantly, a massive output of energy. Scientists believe that the energy output of nuclear fusion could be the key to an inexpensive, ...
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