Reviews

Lots of the discussion around this focuses on its pursuit of a kind of spiritual wonder through gaining scientific understanding, whether that’s via the technical procedure of experimental and theoretical research that seems divisive among readers (I like learning), or through a vaguer ‘eco’ sense of humanity’s place in the web of nature and the Earth’s status in the system of the universe. While there is wonder enough to merit the noted comparisons to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (and the inspirational opening of Oppenheimer, even the thrill of intuition in Tenet — this specifically is why I came to the novel as a priority), the book has a much grimmer streak that takes a clear-eyed view on the corporatisation of scientific progress and individual agency within it, while also acknowledging a more troubled and compulsive side to inspiration and its roots in childhood consciousness, less Nolan and more James Gray’s Ad Astra.

In short it is not a happy book, though it swims in the same inspiration and purposiveness as its characters. It is a book about human disconnection as much as ecological connectivity. I thought it layered these concerns and moods effectively, like translucent patterns stacking in interference to produce a new image — the inspiration never falters even as it becomes threatened by greater forces; one character’s personal recollections aren’t invalidated after contradiction with another character’s perspective; the destructive fate of our present trajectory circles impossibly back to hope for the future.

Below text contains a SPOILER.

SPOILER:

I have only seen suggestions that the epilogue takes place in the planet’s distant past, whereas it seemed clear to me that Leigh had returned to Earth in our future because of the speed of her travel through space and the relativity of time. Surely the idea of ecological collapse and her body reseeding the development of life on a devastated earth through archaea is integral to the book’s message of life’s circularity and growth from devastation. This also provides a justification for Datura’s call from the wilderness: the ship incubates a seed while Earth boils, returning it to restart the process.

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