Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on April 8, 2025

Joe Mungo Reed brings a new perspective to post-apocalyptic fiction in Terrestrial History, a chilling story of global warming. There are elements of science fiction and of a technothriller in the plot, but Reed takes a broader look at the ways in which self-interest and egalitarian drives clash, often in very personal ways, as people work to cope with (or escape) an existential crisis.

The story jumps around in time to focus on family members in different generations. The novel begins in Scotland in 2025, when Hannah sees a boy in a spacesuit walking out of the sea. Hannah has been trying to solve the mystery of fusion but can’t quite design a reactor that works.

In the middle of the century, Hannah’s son Andrew runs for Parliament and then for the position of Scotland’s First Minister. By that point, climate change is making life difficult. A corporation called Tevat, founded by the billionaire Axel Faulk, is planning an excursion to Mars, where — assuming the planet can be terraformed — humanity may have a chance of survival after Earth becomes uninhabitable. Naturally, the passengers who sign up for the voyage are wealthy and powerful, although Tevat allows a couple of its employees to join the crew. Andrew’s opposition to Tevat is the key ideological driver of his decision to enter politics.

Andrew’s daughter Kedzie has taken up her grandmother’s hope of building a fusion reactor to provide clean energy. Lacking other options to fund her ideas, Kedzie goes to work for Tevat. There is tension between Andrew and Kedzie, since Andrew’s political career demands that he oppose Tevat and its unpopular plan to save only the rich and powerful. Some of the book’s strongest moments come when Andrew must decide whether to denounce his daughter after she agrees to join the mission to Mars. The pivotal scene could have been played for melodrama, but Reed lets the characters speak or repress their feelings in a way that feels natural and moving.

Later in the century, Kedzie is on Mars. Kedzie and her wife are the mothers of Roban. The Terrestrial Collapse has occurred. The colonists and the first generation of Mars-born children wonder whether anything remains of the Earth. The kids have pictures and videos so they know about oceans and birds and all the things their parents miss, but their knowledge is abstract. More than most post-apocalyptic stories of global warming, Mungo drives home the magnitude of the climate crisis by viewing it through the eyes of kids who — trapped inside buildings on a desolate planet — don’t understand the richness of their parents’ former life on Earth.

Roban has a sense of duty. “We are not just any children, but those living in the middle of the hourglass, some of the few thousands alive after the loss of so much humanity, amongst the few custodians of our species preparing the way for the Great Repopulation when this place is terraformed and when other habitable planets have been located.” Yet his sense of duty makes him wonder whether he might be able to change history and save the Earth.

Roban is assigned to an asteroid mining crew. He encounters a phenomenon that appears to change the nature of time. Later he takes advantage of the phenomenon to send himself back to 2025. The reader meets him in the first chapter when his great-grandmother sees him walking out of the sea. Roban wants to teach her how to build the reactor that her granddaughter will later create, and in so doing avoid the Terrestrial Collapse.

The possibility of undoing the harm to the Earth, of preventing the Terrestrial Collapse, sets up a moral conflict. If it can be done, what would happen to the Mars colony? Would it never be established? Would its inhabitants be willing to sacrifice themselves to save the larger mass of humanity that they left behind? One member of the colony applies corporate logic — the corporation has a duty to benefit its shareholders, so any larger duty to humanity is irrelevant — an attitude that explains why it is so difficult to make fossil fuel companies admit that they contribute to global warming. If nations move to clean energy, after all, shareholders in fossil fuel companies lose. The companies believe they would be derelict in their corporate duty if they put the existence of all planetary life ahead of short-term profits.

Will Roban succeed? The question is almost unimportant. Like most post-apocalyptic fiction that doesn’t involve zombies, the novel is a cautionary tale.  Reed again eschews melodrama by reporting the planet’s destruction from the viewpoint of children on Mars. The reader doesn’t see people die in floods and fires and hurricanes. The fact that people on Mars don’t know if any life remains on Earth makes the story of the planet’s fate even more powerful.

Terrestrial History is also a multi-generational saga of family members who, sometimes in conflict with each other, try to do what they think is right. The depth of the characters and their relationships with each other are the story’s strength. Reed always writes with literary flair. While Terrestrial History didn’t grip me in the same way as Mungo’s debut novel, it is a strong addition to the subgenre of apocalyptic fiction.

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