I REMEMBER GAIA II

In Greer’s SF novel, three robots in the far future journey through a replacement for the planet Earth, which has been ruined by pollution and climate change.

The year is 3035, more than two millennia since Earth was devastated by climate change and fossil-fuel consumption that went unaddressed by self-centered and willfully ignorant humanity. Ultimately, mankind relocated to an orbit around Jupiter (details are sketchy; it involved terraforming the moon Europa) while the despoiled Earth, once “a planet once so beautiful that its loss made the universe weep,” enjoyed a 2,500-year hiatus from non-sustainable greed and industry. Now, three artificial-intelligence survey probes journey to a potentially reborn Earth (“Gaia II”). Among many wonders, the drones find the semi-ruins of Kyrillia, one of the enlightened cities, inhabited by aliens, that existed during Earth’s recovery. An entity called Wanderer tells the robots how Kyrillia’s people, the Valians, lapsed into ambition and hubris. The city, comparable to mythic Atlantis or Lemuria, declined and had to be humbled. The book may have been more effective if the author had eschewed a standard storytelling format to present this material as pure verse, like an enlarged poetry chapbook. Thinly-plotted at best, the book features adrift-feeling prose containing much Joycean imagery, with entire paragraphs recurring verbatim as though they were refrains, as well as shifts in voice from first-robot singular to plural to everything in between. Abundant colorful wordplay and heightened language revel in the terminology of astrophysics and the bio/quantum realm: “I, now but a lonely carbon atom, find solace in the waiting arms of a five-carbon sugar, RuBP.” Genre masters Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin, Joe Haldeman, and Jane Yolen have dabbled in blending SF and poetry, but Greer’s novel will appeal only to adventurous readers willing to jettison conventional narrative and just bathe in the flow of this starry-eyed trek.

An experimental SF magical mystery tour tied to a climate-change apocalypse.