WESTERN LIGHTS

Schaefer’s eco-thriller follows a group of researchers as they investigate a potentially cataclysmic event, the likes of which hasn’t occurred in almost a million years.

While in Alaska studying polar anomalies, Ethan Sites barely escapes with his life after witnessing inexplicable phenomena including intense northern lights, off-the-charts magnetic fluctuations, flash fires, and methane bubbling out of the permafrost. After he is saved by Sara Gathers, a cetacean biologist (whose mother, Julia, is the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and Mason Hahn, a fisherman and pilot, the group is tasked with following the magnetic North Pole as it moves southward, wreaking havoc as it travels. Entire pods of whales, confused by the changing magnetic fields, beach themselves. Thousands of birds fly aimlessly in circles. Electromagnetic interference makes flying aircraft impossible and disrupts the world’s power grids. As Sara and company begin to put the pieces of the planetary mystery together, they witness something unexplainable: After another powerful Pole movement, the group discovers dozens of dead or dying woolly mammoths (“Most of their large manes and long hair that carpeted them for warmth had burned away. The stench was overwhelming”). Before they can figure out how—and why—animals that have been extinct for 10,000 years are suddenly appearing in the modern day, Sara and the others are pulled into the past by the strange atmospheric phenomena. While the narrative features an ensemble cast of well-developed characters (Mason’s ship captain, Ray Barron, steals the show), nonstop action and adventure, breakneck pacing, and more than a few bombshell plot twists, it’s the underlying reality of the looming global disaster that gives this novel its brass-knuckle punch: “Soon, climate change will reach a tipping point. In ten years, one-third of all plant and animal species living in the nineteenth century will be gone.”

Wildly thought-provoking climate SF with a fascinating time-travel twist.