100 YEARS TO EXTINCTION

In Solomon’s SF novel, members of a high-achieving family embark upon a controversial project to colonize outer space and preserve the self-destructive human race.

The children of the Arvad family are members of Generation Z with strong scientific leanings sharpened by participation in school STEM contests. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they are dismayed to perceive the U.S. moving backward as aggressive anti-science ignorance, homophobia, antisemitism, police brutality, deepfake hoaxes, and false claims by politicians (Donald Trump and Republicans are called out) signal cultural regression. Liz Arvad, a paramedic, is ambushed by a paranoid vaccination-denying gunman. She recovers (with PTSD) to further her studies in medicine and beyond. Liz and her extended family sign a pact to make the future a better place, and in subsequent years her younger sister, Aster, studies astrophysics at UC-Berkeley while their cousin Milo is drawn to progressive politics. It transpires that Liz, Aster and Milo have all been groomed by their grandfather, working in cahoots with online-retail tycoon Quentin Quixote (an idealized Jeff Bezos-type) to colonize space. The Arvads also help found a science-grounded Planet Party as a positive political force and a social-media/broadcast entity called The Planet Channel to counter propaganda. Violent reactionaries (the “Proud Earthers”) and religious zealots oppose them. The narrative reads less like a thriller than a blend of STEM facts, footnotes, bullet-pointed charts, op-eds, and utopian what-ifs rendered in a diary-like format by various characters. Passages of excited speculation (“If cultured meat could replace livestock production, the resulting four billion hectares of land—no longer needed for grazing and growing animal feed—could be used to plant six-trillion new trees”) propel the story. The narrative voice is YA-friendly, though it’s worth noting that the student-age characters grow into sexually active adults. The title chillingly refers to a 2017 warning from physicist Stephen Hawking cautioning that, due to mishandled AI, climate change, and other self-inflicted pathologies, the human race could die out within a century.

A speculative take on space exploration that is more manifesto than adventure yarn.