an epic in the vein of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, whose frameworks allow their authors to flex their skills with both historical and speculative fiction ... A weird, ambitious novel ... Swan’s staccato sentences can be evocative ... Swan’s prose wonderfully portrays things they cannot comprehend but whose meanings are nonetheless plain to the reader. This rich, endlessly engaging novel is, one hopes, the first in a long career for an author who has the talent and imagination to write whatever she wants.
Compelling, sometimes perplexing ... Walk the Vanished Earth is a book that I read easily, steadily, from beginning to end. Swan is particularly good at small, unassuming turns of phrase that employ the familiar fixed cadence and sense of economy that characterizes most of American creative nonfiction ... A contemporary exploration of cultural historiography that is usually downplayed in mainstream science fiction that prioritizes people and survival. It shines best when Swan is on the edge of introducing us to something new ... The result is at times an uneven read, mostly in the earlier chapters, that are eventually eclipsed by Swan’s crisp prose, bold scope, and earnest vision for an uncertain new world.
Even through the lens of one family line, Swan’s novel is an ambitious undertaking—the end of our world and the creation of a new one—and it felt, at times, like Swan had to rush to fit it in under four hundred pages. The frequent time jumps were often jarring: as soon as I found my bearings in one chapter, we were jolted into the next, with new people to care about and new rules to follow ... And yet, Swan creates characters so fully lived in, with such detail and heart, that I would have read more if given the chance. As it is, I read the entire book in three days, gripped by the story.
This isn’t a story that fetishizes individualism — it’s family and community and friendship that carries us into the future. And yet, for all there is to love about the burning and guiding hope Swan’s book holds for our future, Walk the Vanished Earth leaves behind too much to be considered a critical vision of the future ... rich with futurity. Spanning hundreds of years, journeying decades into the future, the history of the family is lush, disturbing, and hopeful ... Swan’s breakdown of family legacy and trauma is complex, but the prioritization of certain narratives undermines the book’s lofty attempts to imagine a future for everyone. In the end, I was left wondering what was happening in the rest of the world ... By the end of the book, I felt unsatisfied. A white writer, whose main characters were primarily black, glossing over environmental racism, delegating anything outside of the United States as periphery, and integrating outdated feminist talking points felt flat. The end result is a beautiful, but ultimately two-dimensional, story of family overshadowed by a gender division and U.S. focus that reads poorly in 2022.
... ambitious but flawed ... Swan has limited success with the sci-fi elements; the futuristic backgrounds fail to persuade, the technology involved in the characters’ journey from Earth to Mars is glossed over, and the choppy, nonchronological narrative muddies the water. On the other hand, Moon and the other characters are created with true depth of feeling, and the consideration of motherhood as its meaning changes over time lands as just short of epic. There’s a lot to admire, but it bites off a bit too much.
