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We have a grand concept, a BIG IDEA, a different take on First Contact and the Fermi Paradox. That’s the good part.

The bad part is that after an interesting opening, we have to slog through page after page, chapter after chapter of talking, talking, and more talking. A bunch of people we never come to care about just sitting around talking. Almost nothing ever seems to happen. And when something finally does happen, we don’t actually see it. We are told about it. This book does a whole lot of telling and very little showing.

My other objection is the way the climate crisis is casually waved aside with a few facile suggestions of carbon-capture trees. Would that it were so easy in real life. There’s no mention at all of ocean acidification and almost nothing about species depletion or loss of biodiversity. I suppose the author just wants to be upbeat, but for me this makes the novel feel much more like fantasy than science fiction.

Overall, a dud. Which is disappointing, because I’ve enjoyed Baxter’s work in the past.

This book was published in 2020, but because gathering material and writing and editing all take time, much of the research the author reports on is from around 2015 to 2019. And you know what? It's already largely out of date.

I'm not faulting the author, Mark Lynas. He couldn't help that. Almost no one could have predicted how rapidly the climate would continue breaking down in just the next few years. But anyway, it's a very good book, an honest and frightening account of how bad the situation already is and how much worse it's likely to become within our lifetimes.

In the end, we're not left without hope. But that hope is based upon the possibility of our industrial society taking unprecedented steps, making enormous and drastic changes between now and circa 2030. Will that happen? Well, even if we the people wanted to make a start, I'm afraid that our leaders, the owners of society, would never allow it — because it would cost them too much money. So there you go.