The sci-fi worlds of high school curricula and the late-century film canon are alive and well in our present tense. Their once-foreign vocabularies – driverless cars, artificial intelligence – have become household references, and their dilemmas are the subject of news headlines. Deb Olin Unferth plunges into this moment, and the many that will follow it, with the language of our future – depopulation, terraforming – and a shrewd tone of reverence for the persistence of life.
In the sandswept, polluted future of Earth 7, humanity is struggling to maintain a crumbling foothold. As life’s single-celled building blocks hunker down and hold on to our planet’s secrets, Unferth’s human protagonists make their way toward one another through the wastelands, driven by those familiar old desires.
We meet Dylan as a child being raised in an underwater pod. Growing up among generators on a desolate sea shelf, she comes to understand that she is “part of the rubble”:
“A new beginning was not on the way,” she realizes. “The end had come and gone.”
The end times have never been a match for adolescent angst. As a lanky teenager, Dylan fights for a life on the surface away from her recalcitrant scientist mother. Yet once on the desertous dry land, she becomes more like her mother than she expected, eventually enamored with the same impulse to research and preserve pieces of the planet that’s already become a figment of society’s imagination. In a man-made re-creation of now-extinct beaches, Dylan meets Melanie, whose experimental plastic surgery and rejuvenation treatments lend her cells a certain kind of immortality, though not quite the kind promised by anti-aging creams. The connection between the two is instant – and not without its obstacles.
There is hope, yes, and love throughout this book, but they are not starry-eyed, world-healing forces.
The quest to cling on to existence as we know it has led some to export their consciousness into star-bound microchips and others to burrow into Mars, an extension of ideas already percolating in our ever-warming world. However optimistically radical these attempts at reimagining humanity are, it’s the fleeting visions of Earth – its running water and sweet-smelling plants, its strange creatures and misunderstood phenomena, even its plastic junk – that Unferth’s characters long for. The humans-turned-Martians return looking for “traces” of humanity’s prime, trying to morph the “angry red planet” into the gentler one that formed them. Here, flipping the pages among all those Earthen wonders, we readers squander them.
While we weld robots and build data centers, our planet grits its teeth, repeating its cycles and seasons with shrinking biodiversity and less stable conditions. As a public, we now know more than ever before that we have tools and methods for reducing harm to the Earth, and yet we lack the selflessness to sacrifice convenience for longevity. If we once wagged our fingers at shortsighted decisions made by sci-fi societies, the grounds to do so are ever shrinking. With the rising tides comes a rising form of so-called climate-fiction, or cli-fi, that draws on a legacy of speculative writers contending with the precarity of our planet and the various ways life might respond to our evolving environmental predicament.
Like Cormac McCarthy in The Road, Unferth excavates humanity from ashen ruins, celebrating our capacity for connection and curiosity. As Joy Williams does in Concerning the Future of Souls, she finds a near-mystical perspective in considering other realms of existence. Unferth’s writing style is economical yet expansive, unspooling omniscient jokes and somersaulting from one point of view into another with practiced dexterity. She takes readers through existential frameworks and into the perspectives of modified tardigrades and “soul globules” with matter-of-fact imagination.
Unferth chuckles empathetically at the foolhardiness of our silly species, endlessly attempting to bandage the gaping wounds in our planet and more often than not pouring salt in them instead, but she does not waste ink on warnings or reprimands. Her prose has no patience for sugarcoating, nor oversentimentality. There is hope, yes, and love throughout this book, but they are not starry-eyed, world-healing forces. The resilience and tenderness found here are stubborn, scarred emotions that coexist with beaten-down apathy and weary realism and are all the more believable for it.
“Earthlings. How rumpled they were, how defeated. But who doesn’t love an underdog?”
Earth 7
By Deb Olin Unferth
Graywolf Press
This article appears in June 19 • 2026.
