The Thousand Earths

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I rarely ever get to read such SF like this. Its focus is equally on both the Ideas and the Human Spirit. I loved the story and it makes me sad that we don't see this kind of serious Big Idea SF anymore. I'll put it out there right now: this is one of my favorite SFs. It got me good. Huge scope, yes, great science, speculation, future history, curiosity, hell, WONDER. And thanks to the dual nature of this novel, there's even such hope -- even in the worst of times. While the scale and complexity of the narrative may be challenging at times, it is this very scope that makes "The Thousand Earths" a rewarding read. The intricate plot threads and the interplay between different timelines create a sense of mystery and anticipation that keeps readers engaged from start to finish. Well, I’m glad to say Baxter is firing on all cylinders with The Thousand Earths, probably his most cohesive and tightly plotted book in a long time. And it is a standalone story! (Though Baxter has been known to pull sequels out of some very improbable hats.)

Plenty of moral ambiguity - is it right to farm people, just so there is a vast number of humanity spread over a long period? Will human nature always revert? Is it right to dismantle planets and asteroids for materials which, once used, are gone? (We're doing that with coal. There will never be more coal, because when the trees fell originally, nothing had evolved to rot them. And helium. It escapes the atmosphere.) Stephen Baxter has to be one of the most prolific SF authors working today. Hardly had I bought Galaxias when I heard about The Thousand Earths coming out later this year. And then the friendly folks at Orion happily sent me an arc from NetGalley UK on the same day I requested it.The novel alternates two narrative threads whose precise relationship is hinted at but not made clear for most of the book’s length. The novel is named for the setting of one thread: some­where and somewhen, there is a flat, artificial, human-inhabited world, one of ‘‘the bright blue-green diamonds of the thousand Earths in their regular array’’ (perhaps along the lines of a Dyson swarm), and it is decaying – literally crumbling along its edges at a predictable rate of 60 meters a day. The girl Mela sees this for herself at age 12 when her parents take her to the Perimeter to witness the destruction as it proceeds: I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Stephen Baxter’s work sprawls, narratively, spatially, temporally, conceptually, and cosmologically. He also has a fondness for extravagantly displacing his protagonists and for setting his stories in strange and mysterious environments. And he does love a comprehensive, apocalyptic disaster – see his recent World En­gines: Destroyer or Galaxias. What I find espe­cially interesting is how many ways he manages to reconfigure these motifs, tropes, and options in his latest, The Thousand Earths.

Stephen Baxter has that innate ability to make what on the surface is seemingly average turn out to be a touch of sheer brilliance. This is basically a two-fold story that eventually blends into a whole. My other doubt was not only that humanity could continue as long as Baxter suggests, but also that it would do so with only trivial genetic changes and with a continuity of history over many millions of years. There is one technological MacGuffin to provide some aspects of that continuity, but even so, given the huge changes that have happened in the 200,000 years since Homo sapiens originated, it somehow seems unlikely that humans will be pretty much the same in the far distant future.As Mela and Ish grow and develop, they become more socially aware, and things within the narrative become more thought-provoking and definitely more emotional. I will leave it there for Mela and her family. The other storyline has a very different timescale. Mela and her family live on one of a set of a thousand space habitats that seem to be science fiction equivalents of the Discworld, though supported by technology, rather than magic and turtles. However, there is something wrong with their habitat, which has been gradually disappearing as the perimeter of the land shrinks more and more. The people know that their world will have entirely disappeared in 30 years - with a gradually growing displacement of refugees. She and her people have always known that this long-predicted end to their home, one of the Thousand Earths, is coming - but that makes their fight to survive, to protect each other, no less desperate . . . and no less doomed.