The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter
(Gollancz, 2022)
Reviewed by Dan Hartland
Sleepers have been waking for much of the history of science fiction. From William Morris to Philip Francis Nowlan through to generation starships and Dave Lister, the trope of a human preserved beyond their natural lifespan waking into a transformed future has proven surprisingly stubborn. Of course, it is a usefully direct means of achieving the contrast between tomorrow’s innovations and today’s challenges that gives some kinds of SF their characteristic frisson; but in that utility it is also rather blunt. The awakened sleeper can sometimes seem to lead the reader by the nose.
One of the many things Stephen Baxter attempts in The Thousand Earths is to under-cut our expectations of this hoary old staple of the genre. His John Hackett boards a ramship in a 2154 already overcoming the challenges of our own time and swapping them for others. His mission: to use his “relativity-busting” (p. 581) ramship to travel to Andromeda and back—a five-million-year-round trip from the perspective of Earth, but on his endlessly accelerating ship only a few years of subjective time.
No sooner have we tried to understand this eon-spanning ambition, however, than we switch to a second narrative. Mela is a child in “Year 30”, on a world which counts down to a future year 0 in which—teenagers learn—it will cease to exist. The edges of the world are slowly encroaching on its imperialistic centre, the pace picking up as “the Tide” comes closer and the colonised peripheries disappear, its people internally displaced. “Earths die,” we’re told. “Like people do” (p. 29).
The relationship of Mela’s time to Hackett’s is not confirmed until the novel’s final pages (that is, around its five hundred and fiftieth), but, as the reader follows both characters, she will begin to intuit what it might be. Mela’s story is relatively straightforward: she proceeds from town to town as her world grows smaller and its all-powerful centre maintains as much order as it can. Hackett’s, however, begins to read almost as a gentle satire not just of the sleeper who wakes but of Baxter’s own oeuvre.
When Hackett arrives five million years into his future, he finds not an impossibly advanced civilisation but a technologically self-sufficient one which is nevertheless to his mind greatly narrower. “Is this all they have, after five million years?” he breathes as he visits a subterranean settlement the size of a large village which has maintained its static population level and culture for eons. Hackett’s experience of waking from his sleep is anti-progressive, a rebuke to the gosh-wow culture shock of Buck Rogers. Hackett resolves to travel even further into the future: this time, five billion years. When he gets there, he’s asked to go another five billion; an accident means he winds up a trillion years hence. Baxter has always loved the long view; but here he gives Hackett so peripatetic a tour through the cosmic timeline that the absurdity is surely part of the point. This is meant, at least a little, to be funny (“Hackett felt bewildered” [p. 347]).
There is, though, a serious point: across all of time, “the only refuge we humans can count as safe…is Earth” (p. 448). Mela’s world is a clear cognate for climate change; the humans whom Hackett meets throughout time remind us that survival—that conservation—is possible, even if it must come with radical change. The Thousand Earths doesn’t quite capture the sense of wonder of the XeeLee Sequence, or the compelling characterisation of his Northland books (Mela’s riven family dynamics feel schlocky, Hackett’s motivations—travelling into the future so the memory of his dead daughter can live for as long as possible—slim); but it is a deadpan sort of hopepunk, a powerful and even refreshing imagining of human capacity—if also, in parts, a motivating itemisation of the ways we might still fail.
Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.