[A] stellar and sweeping science fiction novel that is part cosmic comedy and part dirge to our dying world ... Unferth has honed a narrative voice that falls somewhere between mystic, stand-up comedian and fairy-tale teller. There are frequent funny asides and philosophical musings ... Unferth writes with haunting beauty about our reckless destruction ... A celebration as much as a lamentation
Presents apocalypse as a process, not so much catastrophic as incidental ... Recalls Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle or Carolyn See’s Golden Days. In Earth 7, as in those novels, Armageddon is less an end point than a punctuation, an ellipsis of a kind ... Unferth illuminates if not a pathway to redemption then one in which meaning may be uncovered. That this meaning is temporary, insufficient, is what makes it so profound ... Vivid and unexpected.
Unferth excavates humanity from ashen ruins, celebrating our capacity for connection and curiosity ... She finds a near-mystical perspective in considering other realms of existence. Unferth’s writing style is economical yet expansive, unspooling omniscient jokes and somersaulting from one point of view into another with practiced dexterity. She takes readers through existential frameworks and into the perspectives of modified tardigrades and 'soul globules' with matter-of-fact imagination ... Her prose has no patience for sugarcoating, nor oversentimentality. There is hope, yes, and love throughout this book, but they are not starry-eyed, world-healing forces. The resilience and tenderness found here are stubborn, scarred emotions that coexist with beaten-down apathy and weary realism and are all the more believable for it.
This oddly paced, darkly beautiful, and wryly comic novel serves as a reminder that, as environmentalists remind us, 'there Is No Planet B' ... If Earth 7 is science fiction, it’s science fiction so “soft” that it edges into fable or magical realism ... Attempts the sublime and may in fact achieve it ... Exhausted critics will, more often than they should, reach for jewels when they praise a book. A book is 'gemlike,' it 'sparkles' with a sensibility 'hard as diamond,' its precision brings to mind a stone cut, sanded, and polished to perfection. Earth 7 calls to mind a humbler mineral. It is not a ruby, an emerald, a sapphire, or a diamond. Rather, it is a grain of sand, improbable and unique, in which the reader can see the whole world.
Unferth follows her madcap present-day econovel, Barn 8, with a crystalline, poetic, witty, and haunting post-depopulation tale of loss, adaptation, unexpected beauty, and surpassing love. Every moment is enrapturing, every twist heart-seizing in this keenly imagined, ravishing, and profound celebration of life in extremis.
Though it presents a terrifying post-apocalyptic, post-eco-collapse vision of humanity’s fate, Earth 7 is simultaneously hopeful ... This is a wonderful book. Twists at every turn of the page as unpredictable as the next. It also includes sobering warnings, and perhaps these are predictable: the fragility of Earth’s marvels; the destructiveness of humanity’s appetites; its hubris and misplaced trust in science and technology. What is needed, instead, is love for Earth, and for all forms of life sharing it with us.
Remarkable ... Unferth shines in her ability to craft relatable characters in extraordinary circumstances, and the novel remains accessible even as it explores deep ontological questions about the nature of life. This is profound.
