EARTH 7

Love, loss, and lingering at the end of the world.

“In those years, the sky was full of sulfur and diamonds, shot into the air by cannons to scatter the sunlight. The population of Earth had been falling for decades, and the drop did not have a sole cause.” Unferth’s latest begins with a scientist named Rosemary Stein who’s taking her 5-year-old daughter to live under the sea in a settlement of acrylic pods. Rosemary is definitely not a people person—maybe she’s on the spectrum—and she’s named her daughter XY. “What kind of bonkers name is that?” the kid would like to know. “People call me Dylan.” Beyond miserable in her lonely childhood, Dylan eventually makes an online friend, Zee, who lives on Mars, “a descendant of one of the original Mars settlements,” which turns out to be just one of the ways humans have fled their incinerated planet. (Some people have encoded themselves on microchips, for example.) As Dylan schemes to have Zee rescue her from her apocalyptically boring life, Unferth’s prodigious worldbuilding unfolds magically to offer other possibilities. We next find Dylan at the molecular collections lab in the desert where she was born, her mother’s employer, where she serves an extended internship as a groundskeeper. Then on a company-sponsored break at Vacationland for Singles, “an all-inclusive, fully terraformed resort,” where she falls head over heels for the beautiful Melanie, whom the other guests believe to be a robot but is actually a human who spent seven seasons on a body-modification reality show called Celebrity Plastics where she may have accidentally been given eternal life. And we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Dylan and Melanie’s story—and Zee’s, because he’s still out there somewhere, and Rosemary’s, too—unfold over vast vistas of time and space, profound, funny, alarming, and imbued with love and sorrow for our lost world.

A quirky, bold, and endearing masterpiece of climate fiction.