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Synopsis:

An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet

Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.

Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?

By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.

Review:

When I pick up any book by Deb Olin Unferth, I always know that I am in for a wonderfully weird and creative story. In her latest novel, Earth 7, the world has depopulated, and most of the people who survived have abandoned Earth. Those who have stayed are wanders, derelicts, and researchers trying to figure out how to recreate a new Earth by collecting a bank of DNA. Dylan’s mother is one of those researchers, and when she is a kid, they move to a living pod submerged in the ocean. Dylan grows up watching her mother do research and wanting nothing more than to escape the pod, go to the surface, and be away from her mother. When she is a teenager, Dylan’s mother arranges for her to be an intern at the research facility where she worked before they moved, and once at the research facility, Dylan does not know what do to with herself. The earth she is now exploring for the first tine is covered in sand, like a desert, and she decides she will spend all day outside, sweeping and researching sand, knowing that there are secrets in the sand that might open up the future.

At one point, the research facility pays for her to have a vacation. On this vacation she meets Melanie, a bartender who was a former contestant on a plastic surgery reality show. She has had so much surgery that she is now mistaken for an android. She could also possibly be immortal. The two of them find companionship in a world that is lonely and desolate, and dying more and more everyday. While this is happening, Dylan focuses most of her attention on research, which is the research her mother and her colleagues were doing long before her. This work is her way of trying to be immortal, but as they grow older, the population continues to decline and disappear, and all that is left is her efforts. The isolation these two characters feel, the turning of the earth back to a place before it was inhabited by humans is a slow process, but a process nonetheless. 

There are many broad ideas, things that are hinted toward but not always fully explored in Earth 7. Some of this is to leave the reader to think about the creeping death that the Earth faces, and when everything is covered in sand and life is either abandoned or rough enough to want to be abandoned, will we try to recreate what was already destroyed or going somewhere else to live. We have had many books about the decolonization of Earth for another planet that we can destroy, but the idea of Earth 7 is that is might be just as easy to recreate it. Neither options are very viable, but Dylan and the rest of the researchers feel like it is worth a try. This is a book that can get the reader thinking until they feel the serious depression and doom coming in the future. For a short novel with big questions, the writing seems to wane toward the final quarter. I struggled finishing this novel. The first 75% is entertaining, filled with interesting ideas, whimsy, and a human element to a place that no longer has much. The final section spans a vast amount of time, trying to answer the question that Unferth proposed, and while it is a noble effort and a way for some of the loose threads to be knotted up (threads that honestly are kind of forgotten by this point), there is a feeling that they might have been better left unanswered. The broad overstrokes of the last quarter is also a switch from the intimate, character driven story into a story about the huge ramifications of the end of civilization. And maybe it is because in my mind Deb Olin Unferth’s writing always has a sense of a quirkiness and fun so when it becomes more serious and introspective, I am waiting for the punchline. This did not come, so maybe my expectations is more at fault than the story. Either way I really enjoy Unferth’s work and her writing is compelling in a way that even though this is not her strongest novel, everything that she writes is worth reading because it is very funny, weird, creative, and enjoyable. 

I received this as an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.