(courtesy Angry Robot Books)
Coming up with a truly original idea in any genre or medium of storytelling is always a big ask.
No matter how brilliantly one-of-a-kind your creatively epiphanic moment might be, it’s tricky not to sound like a thousand other great narrative ideas that have gone before; the trick is, of course, to give your inspirational spark a personality and form of its own so unique that it stands head or shoulders above its genre-mates and gets noticed but just as importantly, makes an impact.
One author who’s managed to do this with admirable vivacity is R. W. W. Greene, whose new novel, Earth Retrograde, the second and last instalment in the First Planets duology and the eagerly-awaited follow-up to Mercury Rising, manages to not only keep the story going but to do so in a way that absolutely knocks it out of the park.
Or the solar system, as the case may be.
In the breathlessly clever scenario that underpins the duology, Earth is no longer humanity’s after a powerful alien race from the near-neighbourhood (Venus to be exact) romps on in and declares that our precious blue planet has always been theirs and that we are evolutionary Johnny-come-latelys that don’t have a valid claim to our planetary home.
Humanity being humanity and not prone to taking these sorts of ultimatums lying down, fights back, but it does not go well; the First unleash the mother of all EMPs and millions die which triggers a rethink by Earth governments who agree to evacuate to a specially-created vast area in the heart of Venus or to Mars which ends up being split down the line, borders-wise at least, by the U.S. and Russia.
‘Same old Brook.’ Carmen set her drink on a souvenir ‘Class of 1969’ coaster. She was three-quarters of the way through her second Blue Lagoon. She hadn’t been much of a drinker back in the day. Maybe motherhood changed that. ‘You’ve met aliens. What are they like?’
Not exactly one of Homo Sapiens’ finest moments but one we have to live with, unless, you know, we’re fans of dying which has not exactly been a hallmark of our species so far.
In this significantly altered reality, people either rush to evacuate on U.N.-sponsored flights to Venus, head to Mars if they are lucky enough to be a citizen of its two controlling powers, or stay put on Earth where they pretend life is as it’s always been which might work in the here and the now but which comes with a violently definitive end-date.
Or you can be like the hero/betrayer of humanity (depending on where you sit), Brooklyn Lamontagne, who spends his days trying to earn a buck racing back and forth across the solar system with his business partner, Float, a Jellie, tentacled aliens who are another race with which humanity is in contact and only slightly higher up the pole in acceptability and lifeform worthiness as far as the imperious First are concerned.
His is not a glamorous existence, blighted by some poor decision-making but also by the fact that Lamontagne, who suffered more than his fair share of hard knocks, has never really been at home among the politicking or maneuvering of the elite, being far more at home with the criminal underdogs who, as it turns out, might just be the ones to save humanity.
Not so fast because in Earth Retrograde, nothing is straightforward or certain and in amongst Greene introducing us to a raft of idiosyncratically compelling characters and some very grounded moments of ordinary living – while leaping between planets and scurrying across space might seem exotic to us, it’s run-of-the-mill day-to-day survival for Brooklyn and his friends/lovers/found family – it turns out something rather awful is in the wings that might just be a less attractive option that having a superior alien species change the planetary locks on us.
Yup, it can actually get worse, and when he’s not dancing around some major moments of espionage, ducking and weaving through labyrinthine political skullduggery and trying to figure who’s who in what’s now a very odd and strange galactic zoo, Brooklyn, accompanied by a sentient machine navigator named Om, has to figure if there’s some way that the worst effects of humanity’s latest existential nightmare – surprisingly not of our making which yes, comes as a great shock given our species’ propensity for collectively shooting ourselves in the foot – can not only be ameliorated but maybe even avoided.
It’s a big ask but if anyone can do it, it’s Brooklyn, not because he has tickets on himself or views himself as some sort of god-like hero, but because he’s the sort of person to act and get things done rather than sit by waiting for the universe to swallow him whole.
‘I mighta been okay. I [Brooklyn] don’t die so easy.’ He drank some wine. ‘Those same mistake-making assholes thought they should have power to end the world.’ He shook his head. ‘Pretty fucking stupid.’
It’s possible that Brooklyn is the best thing about Earth Retrograde which is saying something for a novel that’s brimming with cool ideas, spectacularly good world-building and the sort of audacious plot turns that, rather than epically shouting themselves from the solar systemic rooftops, weave in and out of a deceptively simple plot that turns out to be fiendishly immersive in the very best of ways.
It’s possible in Earth Retrograde to think that not much is happening because Greene is happy not to push the narrative faster than it needs to go, but instead to let the characters do their thing and have the narrative spin quietly but impactfully spin out from there.
Hence, while you may bear witness to conversations about past loves or poor decisions at all kinds of fairly grounded events from high school reunions to casual bar conversations, every single moment in Earth Retrograde is leading somewhere big, masked beautifully by an author who knows how to bundle the epic in with the intimate and make them work incredibly well together.
Earth Retrograde is enthrallingly, cleverly good, a sci-novel that takes a well-worn genre, injects it with some seriously cool and highly original ideas and runs hard and entertainingly with it to the point that its quiet beginnings end up as some hugely imaginatively endings, proof that while it might not feel there’s anything narratively new under the sun, there is, and it’s big and emotionally impactful enough to leave a really lasting mark you won’t soon forget.