Rebecca Scherm’s “A House Between Earth and the Moon” grapples with a gaggle of red-hot current issues: income inequality, surveillance, capitalist overreach, AI, cyberbullying, gun control. She packs them all into the powerful rocket engine of climate disaster — the biggest, baddest issue of all — and launches the whole shebang into space.
It’s a rocking ride. The novel is propulsive, captivating, touching, funny — and utterly terrifying.
It’s so frightening because this future world becomes so vividly, devastatingly real. Set in 2033, the near future, “A House” is also set in near space: 220 miles up, on Parallaxis I, the first luxury space station designed for long-term habitation. It’s a home between the Earth and the moon that will provide safe haven for billionaires escaping the horrific fires, heat waves, drought, mass shootings, mudslides, hurricanes and resource scarcity of the planet.
但首先,Parallaxis组装。输入the scientists, engineers and astronauts building the beta stage, and the doctors supporting them. Today’s construction timelines, of course, always get delayed — but imagine builders in space. Zero-G design has so many unexpected stumbling blocks: what to do with all that space dust, how to move couches with muscles weakened from living without gravity, how to come up with material to construct couches in the first place, and how to make a decent cup of coffee. (The last task proves impossible.)
California writer Scherm earned praise with her debut novel, “Unbecoming,” a psychological thriller about an art heist. Here, she skillfully brings alive a large cast of characters, including Alex, a research scientist trying to create a super-algae that can gobble carbon to correct global warming yet who is heartsick over abandoning his wife and two children; his daughter, Mary Agnes, who seeks revenge on her former crush, a fellow teen, who took advantage of their burgeoning friendship to use her face in a deepfake sex tape released to their high school class; Rachel Son, one of two sisters who founded Sensus, the all-powerful, all-knowing maker of ubiquitous phones that track users’ every move, word and vision; and Tess, a Stanford grad and brilliant social scientist specializing in predicting human behavior. Tess doesn’t want to sell out to Sensus but can’t say no to the research opportunity from a corporate giant with access to users’ mind’s eyes.
When contact with the planet is cut off, the residents of Parallaxis can only gaze down at Earth, imagining the stories: “They watched in horror as an extratropical cyclone appeared to ravage the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, and they despaired of what they could not see beneath the clouds.” They are powerless witnesses to destruction, unsettlingly parallel to our current place, imagining results of climate change.
For all of the future’s technological innovations, though, Scherm predicts some things won’t change: Teenagers will make dumb decisions even if all the guidance in the world is only two blinks away; vanity and shame will continue to misdirect the best intentions; and love and forgiveness remain the qualities that make us human, as well as our greatest gifts to each other.
A House Between Earth and the Moon
By Rebecca Scherm
(Viking; 400 pages; $27)
Author event
Book Passage presents Rebecca Scherm in conversation with Edan Lepucki:Virtual event. 5:30 p.m. April 6. Free.www.bookpassage.com