WITHIN A WAKENING EARTH

Two Michigan men revive from comas decades after a mysterious astronomical event altered the laws of nature and try to navigate the bizarre phenomena of a transformed, largely deserted North America.

In this sequel to Heasley’s debut SF novel, Under a Darkening Moon (2022), a bizarre cosmic disaster, the “moondark,” has overtaken the world. The time frame here is 27 years after some kind of celestial collision (or was it?) of an object with Earth’s moon spewed out a blanket of ejecta covering the planet. But it was no mere fall of moondust; the fundamental laws of nature and the universe were shaken. Now, near Detroit, two men, biologist Mort Sowinski and would-be hairstylist Todd Farkas, awaken from decades-long comas, covered in yolklike sacs (their own skins, actually) and not visibly aged. They explore a deserted landscape of ruins and strangeness, where long-extinct fauna, creatures of myth and legend, apparitions, and threatening yet oddly ineffectual, marauding humanoid robots may be encountered. A note left by Todd’s long-evacuated family directs the pair toward Rocky Mountain territory, and—via an advanced Navy anti-gravity vehicle—the duo heads west. Enigmas continue to pile up, with the men speculating that even their own inner psyches, subconscious dissatisfactions, and obsessions are somehow manifesting things in the material universe, perhaps dangerously so. Even when they encounter the organized remnants of humankind (a global population now reduced to a billion) in Colorado—the new seat of government—the protagonists still sense that elusive facts about the moondark are being deliberately withheld from them by the authorities. Perhaps with good reason.

Acquaintance with the first book is not absolutely necessary to enjoy this one, a rare quality in multivolume mind-benders. The sequel is reminiscent of such SF tales of altered cosmology and reality-turned-upside-down as Fred Hoyle’s October the First Is Too Late (1966) and Stephen King’s novella The Mist (1980) or, if readers really dare to go there, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The increasingly philosophical narrative teases readers with questions and hallucinatory developments, even at the risk of making them doubtful that there will be any solid answers to the plot’s conundrums. The author is a Roman Catholic priest, and while very little here may be called evangelical in the usual SF genre sense, religion receives praise as having perhaps a better grip on these things than science ever will. (But the dollops of science that Heasley drops in here and there, courtesy of doctorate-holding Mort, are impressive as well.) There are respectful portrayals of Crow tribal mysticism blended with a guest appearance by an African-born pope, a priest who is a computer programmer, an unspoken approximation of the Gaia hypothesis (that Earth has an overarching soul spirit and self-awareness), and even a mention of the “rapture,” albeit this one seems far from the right-wing Christian prophecies and polemics that typify the Left Behind franchise and its disciples. The engrossing tale ends with a fantastic Jules Verne–esque journey that leaves many riddles remaining to be answered. As Todd says at one point, “Definitely Dreamland.”

This semi-surreal, visionary, apocalyptic SF pilgrimage engages readers while keeping its secrets.