Earth 7

LoveReading Says

The population of Earth has been falling for decades. There isn't one catastrophe to blame, just a world steadily emptying of people. And somewhere beneath its oceans, in a strange settlement called Seagarden, a woman named Rosemary is determined to do something about it.

Rosemary arrives with her five-year-old child - a child with a great face and a funny little march - after a journey by company bus, ship and submarine, finally passing through a decompression chamber and into a circle of glowing underwater pods.

Years pass. Pods empty, corridors are added, sea trees break away. Rosemary has little interest in the social life of Seagarden; invitations and game nights are refused. When her child sleeps, she closes down her daytime work on DNA and begins her night work on consciousness. Preservation consumes her.

Her child is less impressed by life at the bottom of the ocean. The fish are extinct, she's bored out of her mind and she's growing up with a mother who likes to turn off all the lights and lie on the floor as though she's in a coffin. 

I loved Dylan. She's awkward, anxious, monosyllabic and emotionally stunted; a girl whose experience of the world has largely consisted of a lonely ocean and an empty desert. Where Rosemary is obsessed with preserving humanity, Dylan simply wants to experience it. Live it.

Eventually she does escape Seagarden, and Dylan falls in love. This is where Earth 7 really got me. For all of its enormous ideas - depopulation, Mars settlements, extinct species, DNA preservation, uploaded consciousness and whether humanity deserves to survive at all - I found myself completely invested in this strange, lonely woman's attempt to connect.

There's a wonderful tension between Rosemary and Dylan running through the novel too. Dylan gradually begins to wonder - what if survival isn't about resisting Earth's transformation but moving with it?

And from that thought comes Earth 7. There are moments when Earth 7 is completely mindblowing. There are moments when it's bleak, funny, frustrating and unexpectedly sad. And there are ideas thrown at you so quickly that I occasionally had to stop and work out exactly where I was. Where Unferth had taken me.

But Dylan held the whole thing together for me. A child trapped in a transparent pod at the bottom of an empty ocean becomes a woman trying to find her place in a world that may no longer have much use for humans. And ultimately her greatest insight may be the simplest one: perhaps her mother's mistake was believing that humanity needed to save Earth, rather than wondering whether Earth knew perfectly well how to save itself.

Strange, audacious and full of ideas, Earth 7 left me thinking about Dylan, Melanie and that slowly regenerating planet long after I'd finished it.

Perfect for fans of Emily St. John Mandel, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Patricia Lockwood - readers who like their speculative fiction wildly imaginative, intellectually ambitious and deeply human.

Deborah Maclaren

About Earth 7

An exhilarating, wildly inventive tour de force of love, humanity and the end of the world as we know it.

Read the full description

Find This Book In