Paying the Graphite Price: Earthwreck!, by Thomas N Scortia
A vision of the near future from the gauzy hangover of the mid 70’s - two space stations, one American and one Soviet, drift overhead, existing in the same tenuous balance as the world below. Until one day they look down and watch peace on Earth burn and good will toward men evaporate in the glow of all out nuclear exchange. Apart from those souls entombed alive in bunkers, cursed to while away futureless lives until their supplies or sanity are exhausted, the few hundred people aboard the two space stations are humanity’s extant population.
It’s a heavy storytelling task this book sets up: navigating the emotional journeys of characters who’ve just seen everything they knew, loved, and believed in literally disappear in a flash, who can afford no time to mourn as they go about the unimaginable task of keeping the species alive. There’s a massive tension between trying to process all that’s been lost and what that means and needing to spring into frantic action to keep the last faint ember of hope from going cold forever. Rather than using neutral third person, with a limited view of characters’ inner lives, or first person, reducing the personal reflection to a single point of view, Scortia opts for shifting close third person, the narration hopping from shoulder to shoulder. It’s enough to get brief but deep dives into their psyches without losing touch with the overall, urgent picture of wider events.
There is a broad variety of reactions and coping mechanisms among the cast, and each perspective character gives us vivid looks into their past. With the world and all its physical contents erased and inaccessible, those memories become priceless relics, totems to carry into whatever semblance of a new world they can cobble together. Even characters with very stock roles get fleshed out: Lt Col Rothgate reveals himself as Chekhov’s Gun from the first moment he speaks. He bristles with hatred for the Soviets, vitriolically clear that he’s not about to start cooperating with them just because they’re literally the last people who exist. Scortia makes no attempt to hide the fact that this man is eventually going to snap and try to destroy everything, and I honestly kind of appreciate that. But even he gets some humanizing backstory. Rather than a cardboard Evildoer, he’s someone who never healed from the horrifying events he’s been through.
Dr. Janice Svoboda is probably the most interesting and complex character we get to explore - she’s an ace biochemist and the only woman on the American station. The Soviets are split fifty-fifty, the biggest of several reasons the Americans absolutely need to work with them. Svoboda’s scientific tirelessness is the crucial element leading to the breakthroughs that give the survivors a chance to go on. She walks tightropes as a research scientist among military personnel, as a woman among men, and as someone who didn’t have much back on Earth among people crushed by losing everything.
The book has healthy doses of hard science exploration and detailed engineering challenges in the vein of The Martian - The two stations have a limited supply of resources with which to establish a stable, self-sufficient and enduring environment, and biological questions of how to keep the population reproducing healthily for the centuries it will take before Earth is habitable again. There are detailed discussions of propulsion techniques, orbital mechanics, spaceframe engineering, genetic engineering, and oxygen recycling. I think these add a lot of realism and heft to the narrative, but they are often a little too self-contained, acting more like footnotes than a part of the book. If Earthwreck! had an overall dryer or colder tone that wouldn’t be a problem, but because the book ventures into such deep emotional and psychological territory much of the time, the shifts from soulsearching introspection to dry engineering patter can be disorientingly wild swings. I think the book is better for both these elements, but they could have been blended and married a lot more smoothly than they are.
My favorite element may be just how self-analytical the characters are. The absolute change in circumstances forces them to pay attention to their needs, desires, thoughts, even mannerisms. Longo, one of the principal characters, takes special care in observing his own demeanor and his own feelings, taking them apart and putting them back together to cast off what’s no longer helpful in the dire new world. This might be the most effective message of the book, whether intended or not: Those characters who’re able to take hard looks at themselves, understand why they are how they are, and change when necessary, are the ones who can begin to lead humanity through the coming existence on the edge of survival. Those who, like Rothgate, can’t let go of their ingrained patterns even if they’re aware of them, are the ones who endanger everything.
Earthwreck! does a lot, and sometimes the different things it does are jury rigged together in awkward ways, but it takes a deeper look at its own terrifying subject matter than I expected, and draws out some real philosophy from it. If you have a general taste for this era of sci fi I think it’s a standout example.
