Walk the Vanished Earth

De: Erin Swan

Narrado por: Saskia Maarleveld, Keylor Leigh, Dylan Moore

"This rich, endlessly engaging novel is, one hopes, the first in a long career for an author who has the talent and imagination to write whatever she wants."—The New York Times

In the tradition of Station Eleven, Severance and The Dog Stars, a beautifully written and emotionally stirring dystopian novel about how our dreams of the future may shift as our environment changes rapidly, even as the earth continues to spin.

The year is 1873, and a bison hunter named Samson travels the Kansas plains, full of hope for his new country. The year is 1975, and an adolescent girl named Bea walks those very same plains; pregnant, mute, and raised in extreme seclusion, she lands in an institution, where a well-meaning psychiatrist struggles to decipher the pictures she draws of her past. The year is 2027 and, after a series of devastating storms, a tenacious engineer named Paul has left behind his banal suburban existence to build a floating city above the drowned streets that were once New Orleans. There with his poet daughter he rules over a society of dreamers and vagabonds who salvage vintage dresses, ferment rotgut wine out of fruit, paint murals on the ceiling of the Superdome, and try to write the story of their existence. The year is 2073, and Moon has heard only stories of the blue planet—Earth, as they once called it, now succumbed entirely to water. Now that Moon has come of age, she could become a mother if she wanted to—if only she understood what a mother is. Alone on Mars with her two alien uncles, she must decide whether to continue her family line and repopulate humanity on a new planet.

A sweeping family epic, told over seven generations, as America changes and so does its dream, Walk the Vanished Earth explores ancestry, legacy, motherhood, the trauma we inherit, and the power of connection in the face of our planet’s imminent collapse.

This is a story about the end of the world—but it is also about the beginning of something entirely new. Thoughtful, warm, and wildly prescient, this work of bright imagination promises that, no matter what the future looks like, there is always room for hope.

©2022 Erin Swan (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Though the shifting planets and timelines bring to mind the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin and David Mitchell... Swan has fashioned a deeply original story that reflects on America’s founding myths, the climate damage wrought by all of us, and the many unknowns of the century ahead.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Erin Swan's debut novel enthralled me from the first page. Walk the Vanished Earth is weird, wonderful and beautifully written; I never knew what would happen next, but was deeply satisfied by each turn of the story. A floating city! Seven generations of a single family line! Life on Mars! I highly recommend this novel.” —Ann Napolitano, bestselling author of Dear Edward

“Walk the Vanished Earth is a beautiful achievement. A story of mothers and daughters, climate collapse, improbable love, space travel, disaster and redemption, destiny and choice – it’s nearly impossible to describe all the notes Erin Swan hits in this astonishing debut. Swan writes in spare, elegant prose that conjures an 1880s Kansas prairie just as vividly as a futuristic colony on Mars. Both timely and timeless, this novel will stay with me for a long time to come.” —Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics

Couldn't finish it

Difficult to follow timelines. I didn't enjoy the characters or the subject matter. Quit after a few chapters.

Interesting case of whiplash

The drastic change in timelines makes for some head hurting. When the story comes together in the end the satisfaction was minimal.

Predictive Programming? | Spoilers

We’ll-written and great narration, IMHO
HOWEVER…the rapid increase in storms mentioned in this book are attributed to the ‘man made climate change’ theory. WAKE UP PEOPLE- look up at #ChemTrails and let’s try to #StopChemTrails and stop H.A.A.R.P. so they don’t use the climate change legislation as a way to grab more money and control over the Sheeple.

Fresh new story

It's been awhile since I've come across a story that was different than so many others. It truly absorbed me into the plot I listed practically straight through without stopping. time jumps were handled well so as to be thrilled with each story rather than plodding through to get back to other parts.. whether it be past present or future all characters were interesting and well developed and all time segments handled skillfully. It kept me guessing unable to figure out what came next. you won't be sorry...it's a great read/listen! the narrators did and excellent job not only with smooth clear easy listening but it the various voices of characters. nothing overdone, just right.

excellent start to finish

Beautifully painted
broad strokes trickle down into
exquisite details

Can't wait for more from this author.

Not my favorite

This story is too disconnected and incomplete for me. At first I wasn't sure if it was a novel or a collection of short stories. A tale full of betrayal, disaster, murder, violence, despair, impending doom, and pedophilia isn't my favorite kind of book.
The author's ability to describe scenes is very skilled though.

a psychotic pregnant 12-yr-old and her rapist...

...didn't make for great reading. I didn't finish the book.

If you're interested in beautiful language, this is the book for you. If you enjoy being confused, it's the book for you. It was not the book for me. No coherent story to be found.

I give this a grade of C!

Walk the Vanished Earth
Erin Swan
2023 - Penguin Random House

The thing with trauma is that it is never just about us. The pain of that traumatic event goes on and on, from us to our kids, and then their kids, compounding and shaping each generation as they struggle with how to move forward, to be different and do better, all the while leaving a whole new mess for their kids. One could say that the whole of human history is nothing but a long story of generational trauma. Erin Swan’s debut novel, Walk the Vanish Earth, follows only one family’s thread, across generations from the bustling decks of England and the vast prairies of Kansas in the nineteenth century, to the loneliness of a space colony two centuries later. Within the shifting narratives of perspective comes a tale of the pains and sorrow we carry with us, the accumulation of hurts and frustrations, and how those manifest on both a personal level but also to the world around us as humanity continues to figure out how to keep surviving, to keep striving, despite it all.

The novel’s plot is not easy to piece together. While the story starts in 1873, we quickly bounce between shifting periods and perspectives, but what is clear is that no matter our time, we are seeing the effects of our Industrial Revolution on the people living in it and past it, and the horrible havoc our choices have wrought upon our relationships with each other and with the environment we live in. What seems like a small story at the beginning - the tale of Samson, who fled an alcoholic, abusive father in Britain to make his way in life slaughtering buffalo in the high plains- feels oddly poignant as you read through the book. It is but one example of how what seems like small things can spiral and snowball, leading to other hurts and other broken decisions generations later.

But even in this despair, there is quiet hope, the desire to build, to aspire, to continue both life and culture. The world may be flooding and burning, but humanity continues to strive. Trauma may change everything about the world that came before, but we must pick up the pieces to build something new and better to pass on to the next generation. This story is as much about how we attempt to survive, heal, and move forward as it is about the hurts we cause and the damage we create. Swan manages both halves of this story, perhaps not with as much deft as she could, but enough that even in the worst moments, there is still quite a joy to be found in the small victories for our characters, even as the world falls apart.

The analogy between the trauma humans cause to one another and the trauma humans cause to our environment is a brilliant link in Swan’s writing. The metaphor is an apt one. We can see in real time how our accumulated years of pollution and indifference to doing anything to fix it have compounded almost to the point of no return in our environment. I think we can all agree that we have had traumas like that in each of our lives, and people who have pushed that limit as well. Trauma happens, and we can’t ever go back. We can only move forward, and the only choice we get is just what that moving forward looks like.

Swan’s writing is gorgeous, with biblical themes and images peppered throughout, highlighting the apocalyptic nature of what is to come. The character of Paul comes to mind, short for his age, gaining him the inevitable nickname of “Small Paul.” His journey and epiphany call to mind his biblical namesake, who was also a man of small stature, turning to evangelism after his brush with a divine vision. Other scenes flow with a cinematic sweep that brings to mind films like Dances with Wolves, Paper Moon, even 2001: A Space Odyssey, or The Martian. Swan’s ability to capture the nuance of a geographic region in a few words (even my beloved Kansas City, where I still visit my old college friends from William Jewell) immediately takes me not just to a scene, but to a place, one I can feel, taste, and touch.

While Swan excelled at the theme of her book, I found myself struggling was actually with the characters. Whether they were likable or not is a bit of a moot point, as the story in some ways isn’t even about them. Still, I never found myself particularly engaged with any one of them, either in sympathy or in dislike. The one character I perhaps felt any particular feeling for was Bea, poor, abused, broken Bea, who floats through the lives of those she’s touched like a prophetic wraith. It is unclear if she is truly foretelling the future or if she is suffering the effects of the horrific abuse she suffered. The ambiguous nature with which Swan addresses this is both unsettling and somewhat infuriating! A child was physically and mentally abused by her father, but perhaps she is a Madonna figure? And perhaps in this gray area, we can make a commentary on how we as human beings can often mystify trauma, or turn it into something sacred or holy - see the story of Jesus Christ, let alone any saint’s hagiography, to find that. But not calling out that this person is also a victim of horrible crimes and calling them what they are was a large miss for Swan here.

Motherhood also plays a huge role in the story, and there are various kinds of motherhood: good, bad, absent, and overbearing. To a certain extent, like trauma, Swan holds up motherhood as sacred. Figures such as Eve and the Virgin Mary are hinted at with several of our characters, women who give birth to children who carry not only their scars, but their secret hopes for the future as well. Unfortunately, her beatification of the “mother” (another connection to Mother Earth and her environmental theme), also has the unfortunate side effect of turning every female character into something of a one note person, whose real purpose isn’t to be a human being on their own, but to be a vessel that will produce another human being who will get to have a life and change the world. It is a bit disheartening, most notably with the characters of Kay, a brilliant young girl with a love for words, and her daughter, who goes on to colonize Mars. It feels reductive, shrinking women down to what they produce, rather than who they are and what they can do, and assumes that womanhood is all about carrying a child. Not every woman in the world wants a child, and not every woman can carry a child or is biologically equipped to. This is a place where Swan’s lyrical connection of themes perhaps had an unintended side effect that marginalizes a whole swath of people who identify themselves as “women,” while also limiting the personhood of all women.

On the whole, I wanted to like Swan’s book more than I did. It was fine! Her prose is gorgeous, her imagery and allegory spot on. And yet, there were aspects of her storytelling that I felt got away from her, places where her thematic imagery left me feeling unsettled and somewhat insulted. I don’t think that this was Swan’s intention, but a side-effect of the bigger story she was trying to tell and the thematic ideas she attempted to connect. Mileage may vary on this story for some. For myself, I didn’t connect with it, and found those lingering problems took me too far out of the story to enjoy it. For others, these may be small bumps in the road to enjoying a gorgeous story. In this, I wish you the joy of reading it, for loving it however you come to it. For me, I cannot, but I certainly admire the work and effort Swan has put into it.