Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah's help. Laboring in the warmth of a Scottish summer, Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough--and then things go terribly wrong. Joe Mungo Reed's novel expands from this extraordinary event, drawing together the stories of four lives reckoning with what it means to take fate into their own hands, moving from the last days of civilization on Earth through the birth of another on Mars.
For a slender book, Terrestrial History delivers an enthralling plot; complex, realized characters; and a wealth of fine-cut sentences ... Piercing, poetic.
A century-spanning, multigenerational saga about one family’s experiences with Earth’s unfolding climate catastrophe, an affecting, emotional story about loss, community, and the false promise that we may somehow be able to find a convenient escape from the consequences of our actions ... Reed deftly taps into our present anxieties, not just that of our worsening climate, but of our worsening relationship to one another.
Moving and intelligent ... [A] richly drawn family history ... Reed uses the multivocal structure to great effect ... The novel is a triumph of the climate fiction genre ... A brilliant exploration of time and the possibilities inherent in any vision of the future, Terrestrial History manages to be both hopeful and devastating.
