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Earth 7
An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet
Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.
Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?
By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.
Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.
Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?
By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published June 9, 2026
About the author
Deb Olin Unferth
26 books250 followersDeb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, including the novel Barn 8 and the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, NOON, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, three Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin, she also runs the Pen City Writers, a creative writing program at a penitentiary in southern Texas.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 13, 2026
A deeply human speculative fiction novel about the planet we live on and the vastness of space. The is smart science fiction for fans of Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler and Simon Jimenez. Uplifting and devastating in equal measure this is a book that rewards patience and attention, that wants us to believe in our best selves.
April 20, 2026
Live laugh love Deb Olin Unferth
June 11, 2026
Sort of like watching a shadow puppet show across the last fires on Earth. There's a distance here created by the reported speech and the time and perspective jumps of the narration. There's also a sense of peaceful resignation about the end of humanity and the end of most life on Earth. Death is an inevitable part of life, the book seems to say, so why wouldn't the death of the Earth also be an inevitability? Not something to cry about. The story follows Dylan Stein and her wife Melanie, as they navigate that end with remarkable indifference. It was quite sweet, and gentle, with occasional moments of humour largely from the knowing interjections of the omniscient narrator. It reminded me most strongly of Orbital via Becky Chambers. I enjoyed it, but I think the general lack of passion stopped it from being a truly great read for me. Oh and there's a LOT of sand.
June 15, 2026
not normally a sci fi girl but this isn’t really sci fi? struck both my whimsical and anxious chords and made me feel like #fuck AI . being alive is the greatest gift
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Welcome to the Future – Please Place Your Body, Planet, and Feelings in Long-Term Storage
In “Earth 7,” Deb Olin Unferth turns preservation culture into speculative comedy, romantic damage, and philosophical argument, all while keeping a wary eye on anyone who says they’re here to help.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 9th, 2026
At the edge of a storage-container shelter and an advancing desert, two altered lives hold a brief human warmth against the larger drift of a world that will not stay still for anyone.
The first bad idea in “Earth 7” is so decent-sounding that it takes a moment to register the toxin in it: if the world is failing, preserve it. Put the child in the pod, the species in the vault, the mind on the chip, the future on a shelf. Deb Olin Unferth takes that impulse, wearing the face of care and the manners of expertise, and keeps worrying it until the stitching gives. “Earth 7” is not really a novel about how to save a broken world. It is a novel about how the wish to keep anything intact may be one of the reflexes that helped turn the world into storage in the first place.
Sea Garden, the underwater habitat where Rosemary Stein raises her daughter, is protection in the same way a specimen jar is protection. Nothing gets in. Very little thrives. Rosemary, scientist and hard-shell misanthrope, has taken Dylan below the surface to wait out catastrophe in a carefully regulated environment of flood lamps, filtered air, mechanical drone, and preservation schemes. She defers to systems more readily than she trusts people. Her official work involves molecular collections. Her private obsession is consciousness transfer. She wants life in forms that can be stabilized, indexed, and called back up later. Dylan is the child inside that worldview, folded into a storage scheme before she is old enough to refuse it.
The first place the apparatus betrays itself is a name. Rosemary has called her daughter “XY,” as if a girl were a problem set. The girl, with better instincts than the adults around her, becomes Dylan Stein. That change matters because it turns a variable back into a person. It also tells you, early, what this novel will keep proving. Sea Garden can preserve the body and thin the life inside it. Dylan grows up staring through acrylic at a sea that does not come back, waiting for fish that do not return, learning that a controlled environment can still feel like a sentence.
Inside the pod’s acrylic hush, Dylan learns the book’s first cruel lesson: protection can preserve the body while thinning the life inside it.
For a while the novel seems to offer her a door in the form of Zee, a Martian salvage worker orbiting above Earth. He is flirtation, company, some other arrangement of breath and motion. But Unferth is too severe, and too sly, to let longing cash out as rescue. When the Martians finally descend, the sequence works as a rescue scene built to embarrass rescue. Zee is not there. The collection Dylan thought might matter to them looks, from outside, more aspiration than fact. They leave without her. What fails here is not only a dream. It is the belief that desire and logistics ever belonged to the same order of reality.
Dylan does get out eventually, though not by miracle and not in one clean upward line. The surface is less freedom than ruin with transit, bureaucracy, and fluorescent lighting. Her body, tuned to enclosure, revolts. She vomits, squints, panics, adjusts by ugly increments. Up top, the planet is damaged but fully employed: desert labs, salvage routes, corporate resorts, all the procedural afterlives of a world that has already burned through its better options. From there the novel keeps changing shape before the reader has settled into the last one. Dylan passes through a research facility devoted to molecular collections, where the backup fantasy has become routine. She meets Melanie at Vacationland for Singles, a fake beach so aggressively cheerful it ought to require municipal oversight. Dylan first mistakes Melanie for a robot. It is exactly the kind of mistake this novel knows how to use.
In the false glow of Vacationland, Melanie stands like a perfected surface beginning to crack, her body carrying the novel’s satire of repair, glamour, and artificial survival.
Melanie is where the novel stops merely impressing and starts to bruise. She is not a machine, but neither is she granted the dignity of ordinary embodiment. Years of cosmetic intervention, implants, experimental procedures, and a regenerative technology called the Regenerator have left her both fragile and perversely hard to finish off. She knows what it is to be maintained past reason. Her body is a long repair job sold as glamour, a museum of bad promises still humming under the skin. If Rosemary represents one version of anti-life preservation, Melanie represents another: the body as project, product, and backup culture at once. Dylan’s love for her begins under misrecognition and then, more interestingly, survives the correction. That is exactly right for this novel. Unferth is not interested in pure attachment. She is interested in what remains once the categories stop holding.
From there “Earth 7” keeps slipping into a larger frame while you watch. Rosemary follows her own logic to its bleakest punch line by having herself transferred onto a chip and fired into space. Dylan wanders into the desert with a suicidal cult she mistakes for sand nomads. Zee keeps combing Earth’s wreckage for traces to send back to Mars, turning salvage into a profession and then, quietly, into a joke. Out of all this scatter comes the book’s sharpest answer back. Dylan, studying the life hidden between grains of sand, begins to imagine another way of carrying life forward: not vaults, not upload fantasies, not cryogenic stasis, but forms that can dry out, sleep, move, revive, and alter. The title stops sounding like versioning and starts sounding like dissent.
[image error]
Bent over the small lives hidden in sand, Dylan begins to imagine a future not stored against change but carried through it.
That is the idea that makes the whole contraption worth building. “Earth 7” shows preservation to be a bad premise hidden inside a noble word. The pod, the cryochambers, the bunker logic, the uploaded afterlife, the Martian trace bins, even Melanie’s body, all are versions of the same wish: keep the thing legible, retrievable, under hand. Unferth’s counterproposal is harsher and, because harsher, more convincing. Continuity here does not mean escaping alteration. It means surviving it. The move from vault logic to sand logic is not a speculative flourish clipped to the side of the story. It is the story correcting itself.
The prose keeps all this thinking from sitting on the page like theory with legs screwed on. Unferth writes in a clipped, summary-rich register that can seem almost anti-lyrical until a sentence suddenly lets odd light through. Her typical unit is short to medium in length, declarative, dry, and exact. The diction moves easily among lab talk, maintenance speech, deadpan social observation, and flashes of eerie physical detail. She is especially good at letting absurdity and grief stand in the same room without forcing either to dress up. Vacationland gets its joke. The mammoth project gets its joke. The company bus gets its song. Even when the material turns terminal, the prose never puffs itself up into apocalypse-speak. That tonal self-command saves the novel from spectacle on one side and sermon on the other.
It also imposes costs. Unferth prefers compression to saturation. She trims scenes to pressure points, reports long stretches of life in summary, and gives more fullness to argument than to many of the supporting bodies orbiting it. At her best, that feels brisk and exact. When the book relaxes its grip, the page can feel set before it feels lived. Too many side figures arrive with job descriptions before they arrive as people. The social field is legible and often funny, but not especially dense. Readers who want crowded, fully peopled realism may feel, now and then, that the novel has settled the terms before the scene had a chance to misbehave.
Form is where Unferth drops the last pretense of staying manageable. “Earth 7” begins as an enclosure novel, turns into a queer love story, mutates into desert satire and salvage fiction, and then keeps going after Dylan’s death into planetary and posthuman territory that most novelists would sensibly avoid. The enlargements are plotted, not ornamental. Each new frame revises the one before it. Sea Garden first looks like refuge, then like maternal violence with tasteful branding. The desert lab first looks like the pod’s bureaucratic cousin, then like the place where Dylan learns how sterile the backup fantasy really is. Even the Martian material, which might have felt merely attached, ends up exposing what humans decide counts as value once a world has already been reduced to traces.
The fight this novel picks with the reader comes late, when it shifts the unit of attention from person to matter to process. Melanie lingers, disperses, keeps noticing. Earth continues after the humans. Messages arrive across absurd distances. New life emerges. Some readers will welcome that as the novel finally honoring the scale of its own thought. Others will feel the floor tilt under the story they had agreed to follow. That complaint is earned. Once the book leaves Dylan and Melanie behind, some of its emotional voltage leaks into theory. At key moments it opens outward just when you want it to press harder into the bruise.
Still, better that overreach than a tasteful false finish. A smaller novel would have snapped back to a human-sized ending and congratulated itself on wisdom. Unferth refuses. She has written a book in which prevention has already failed and what remains is upkeep: sweeping, patching, tending, improvising, trying again. That is why it feels recognizably of now below the level of topic. “Earth 7” understands that catastrophe no longer arrives only as event. It settles into routine. The sulfur cannons keep firing. The fake beach keeps glittering. Salvage becomes a job. Groundskeeping becomes a philosophy. The crisis is not coming. It has moved in and is using the kitchen.
In the stripped-down tenderness of washing and being washed, “Earth 7” lets care become more convincing than any system built to outwit damage.
The love story keeps the novel from dissolving into a very smart position paper. Dylan and Melanie’s desert life is makeshift, erotic, companionable, and never falsely redemptive. Love rescues neither woman from damage, history, or mortality. Dylan still dies young. Melanie still goes on. But their life together is where the novel stops briefing you and starts proving what it means. Continuity here is not the maintenance of an original form. It is the local, temporary flourishing that altered beings manage between them when they stop asking one another to remain intact.
I came out at 86/100, or 4 stars, which feels right for a novel whose tensile strength outruns its drag. You can see the weld lines, and the book is wiser for not hiding them. It gives more fullness to its argument than to some of its people. Even so, its slacker passages keep chewing the problem. Its driest jokes keep the material from turning holy. Its sharpest claims keep scraping back into mind. Melanie is unforgettable. Rosemary is exasperating in exactly the productive way. And the late coda, for all the strain it introduces, refuses easier consolations than the novel has earned.
Half-buried boat, dead tree, and widening sand turn absence itself into an afterimage, where love, matter, and memory persist without needing to remain intact.
When the plot has finished moving, what remains is not doctrine but deposit: grit, attrition, recurrence. Not locking the thing away. Not backing it up forever. Not launching a cleaner copy into the dark and calling that survival. Letting what matters pass through sleep, damage, mutation, burial, and return in another form, if it returns at all. The old dream stored the world. Unferth’s less consoling dream lets it sift beyond storage, grain by grain, into something too alive to sit still on a shelf.
These small studies search for the book’s governing balance: box against dune, shelter against drift, and two human figures held between storage and exposure.
At the underdrawing stage, the painting reveals its quiet architecture, letting threshold, horizon, and negative space establish the emotional pressure before color arrives.
With the first washes laid in, the image begins to breathe, as light, atmosphere, and the book’s tension between intimacy and erosion enter the frame together.
The swatch sheet translates the cover’s blues, rusts, and pale lights into a review palette, showing how mood is built chromatically before the finished image takes hold.
This test sheet shows the painting becoming a literary object, as border, title, author name, and signature are worked into the image’s larger logic of containment and erosion.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
In “Earth 7,” Deb Olin Unferth turns preservation culture into speculative comedy, romantic damage, and philosophical argument, all while keeping a wary eye on anyone who says they’re here to help.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 9th, 2026
At the edge of a storage-container shelter and an advancing desert, two altered lives hold a brief human warmth against the larger drift of a world that will not stay still for anyone.
The first bad idea in “Earth 7” is so decent-sounding that it takes a moment to register the toxin in it: if the world is failing, preserve it. Put the child in the pod, the species in the vault, the mind on the chip, the future on a shelf. Deb Olin Unferth takes that impulse, wearing the face of care and the manners of expertise, and keeps worrying it until the stitching gives. “Earth 7” is not really a novel about how to save a broken world. It is a novel about how the wish to keep anything intact may be one of the reflexes that helped turn the world into storage in the first place.
Sea Garden, the underwater habitat where Rosemary Stein raises her daughter, is protection in the same way a specimen jar is protection. Nothing gets in. Very little thrives. Rosemary, scientist and hard-shell misanthrope, has taken Dylan below the surface to wait out catastrophe in a carefully regulated environment of flood lamps, filtered air, mechanical drone, and preservation schemes. She defers to systems more readily than she trusts people. Her official work involves molecular collections. Her private obsession is consciousness transfer. She wants life in forms that can be stabilized, indexed, and called back up later. Dylan is the child inside that worldview, folded into a storage scheme before she is old enough to refuse it.
The first place the apparatus betrays itself is a name. Rosemary has called her daughter “XY,” as if a girl were a problem set. The girl, with better instincts than the adults around her, becomes Dylan Stein. That change matters because it turns a variable back into a person. It also tells you, early, what this novel will keep proving. Sea Garden can preserve the body and thin the life inside it. Dylan grows up staring through acrylic at a sea that does not come back, waiting for fish that do not return, learning that a controlled environment can still feel like a sentence.
Inside the pod’s acrylic hush, Dylan learns the book’s first cruel lesson: protection can preserve the body while thinning the life inside it.
For a while the novel seems to offer her a door in the form of Zee, a Martian salvage worker orbiting above Earth. He is flirtation, company, some other arrangement of breath and motion. But Unferth is too severe, and too sly, to let longing cash out as rescue. When the Martians finally descend, the sequence works as a rescue scene built to embarrass rescue. Zee is not there. The collection Dylan thought might matter to them looks, from outside, more aspiration than fact. They leave without her. What fails here is not only a dream. It is the belief that desire and logistics ever belonged to the same order of reality.
Dylan does get out eventually, though not by miracle and not in one clean upward line. The surface is less freedom than ruin with transit, bureaucracy, and fluorescent lighting. Her body, tuned to enclosure, revolts. She vomits, squints, panics, adjusts by ugly increments. Up top, the planet is damaged but fully employed: desert labs, salvage routes, corporate resorts, all the procedural afterlives of a world that has already burned through its better options. From there the novel keeps changing shape before the reader has settled into the last one. Dylan passes through a research facility devoted to molecular collections, where the backup fantasy has become routine. She meets Melanie at Vacationland for Singles, a fake beach so aggressively cheerful it ought to require municipal oversight. Dylan first mistakes Melanie for a robot. It is exactly the kind of mistake this novel knows how to use.
In the false glow of Vacationland, Melanie stands like a perfected surface beginning to crack, her body carrying the novel’s satire of repair, glamour, and artificial survival.
Melanie is where the novel stops merely impressing and starts to bruise. She is not a machine, but neither is she granted the dignity of ordinary embodiment. Years of cosmetic intervention, implants, experimental procedures, and a regenerative technology called the Regenerator have left her both fragile and perversely hard to finish off. She knows what it is to be maintained past reason. Her body is a long repair job sold as glamour, a museum of bad promises still humming under the skin. If Rosemary represents one version of anti-life preservation, Melanie represents another: the body as project, product, and backup culture at once. Dylan’s love for her begins under misrecognition and then, more interestingly, survives the correction. That is exactly right for this novel. Unferth is not interested in pure attachment. She is interested in what remains once the categories stop holding.
From there “Earth 7” keeps slipping into a larger frame while you watch. Rosemary follows her own logic to its bleakest punch line by having herself transferred onto a chip and fired into space. Dylan wanders into the desert with a suicidal cult she mistakes for sand nomads. Zee keeps combing Earth’s wreckage for traces to send back to Mars, turning salvage into a profession and then, quietly, into a joke. Out of all this scatter comes the book’s sharpest answer back. Dylan, studying the life hidden between grains of sand, begins to imagine another way of carrying life forward: not vaults, not upload fantasies, not cryogenic stasis, but forms that can dry out, sleep, move, revive, and alter. The title stops sounding like versioning and starts sounding like dissent.
[image error]
Bent over the small lives hidden in sand, Dylan begins to imagine a future not stored against change but carried through it.
That is the idea that makes the whole contraption worth building. “Earth 7” shows preservation to be a bad premise hidden inside a noble word. The pod, the cryochambers, the bunker logic, the uploaded afterlife, the Martian trace bins, even Melanie’s body, all are versions of the same wish: keep the thing legible, retrievable, under hand. Unferth’s counterproposal is harsher and, because harsher, more convincing. Continuity here does not mean escaping alteration. It means surviving it. The move from vault logic to sand logic is not a speculative flourish clipped to the side of the story. It is the story correcting itself.
The prose keeps all this thinking from sitting on the page like theory with legs screwed on. Unferth writes in a clipped, summary-rich register that can seem almost anti-lyrical until a sentence suddenly lets odd light through. Her typical unit is short to medium in length, declarative, dry, and exact. The diction moves easily among lab talk, maintenance speech, deadpan social observation, and flashes of eerie physical detail. She is especially good at letting absurdity and grief stand in the same room without forcing either to dress up. Vacationland gets its joke. The mammoth project gets its joke. The company bus gets its song. Even when the material turns terminal, the prose never puffs itself up into apocalypse-speak. That tonal self-command saves the novel from spectacle on one side and sermon on the other.
It also imposes costs. Unferth prefers compression to saturation. She trims scenes to pressure points, reports long stretches of life in summary, and gives more fullness to argument than to many of the supporting bodies orbiting it. At her best, that feels brisk and exact. When the book relaxes its grip, the page can feel set before it feels lived. Too many side figures arrive with job descriptions before they arrive as people. The social field is legible and often funny, but not especially dense. Readers who want crowded, fully peopled realism may feel, now and then, that the novel has settled the terms before the scene had a chance to misbehave.
Form is where Unferth drops the last pretense of staying manageable. “Earth 7” begins as an enclosure novel, turns into a queer love story, mutates into desert satire and salvage fiction, and then keeps going after Dylan’s death into planetary and posthuman territory that most novelists would sensibly avoid. The enlargements are plotted, not ornamental. Each new frame revises the one before it. Sea Garden first looks like refuge, then like maternal violence with tasteful branding. The desert lab first looks like the pod’s bureaucratic cousin, then like the place where Dylan learns how sterile the backup fantasy really is. Even the Martian material, which might have felt merely attached, ends up exposing what humans decide counts as value once a world has already been reduced to traces.
The fight this novel picks with the reader comes late, when it shifts the unit of attention from person to matter to process. Melanie lingers, disperses, keeps noticing. Earth continues after the humans. Messages arrive across absurd distances. New life emerges. Some readers will welcome that as the novel finally honoring the scale of its own thought. Others will feel the floor tilt under the story they had agreed to follow. That complaint is earned. Once the book leaves Dylan and Melanie behind, some of its emotional voltage leaks into theory. At key moments it opens outward just when you want it to press harder into the bruise.
Still, better that overreach than a tasteful false finish. A smaller novel would have snapped back to a human-sized ending and congratulated itself on wisdom. Unferth refuses. She has written a book in which prevention has already failed and what remains is upkeep: sweeping, patching, tending, improvising, trying again. That is why it feels recognizably of now below the level of topic. “Earth 7” understands that catastrophe no longer arrives only as event. It settles into routine. The sulfur cannons keep firing. The fake beach keeps glittering. Salvage becomes a job. Groundskeeping becomes a philosophy. The crisis is not coming. It has moved in and is using the kitchen.
In the stripped-down tenderness of washing and being washed, “Earth 7” lets care become more convincing than any system built to outwit damage.
The love story keeps the novel from dissolving into a very smart position paper. Dylan and Melanie’s desert life is makeshift, erotic, companionable, and never falsely redemptive. Love rescues neither woman from damage, history, or mortality. Dylan still dies young. Melanie still goes on. But their life together is where the novel stops briefing you and starts proving what it means. Continuity here is not the maintenance of an original form. It is the local, temporary flourishing that altered beings manage between them when they stop asking one another to remain intact.
I came out at 86/100, or 4 stars, which feels right for a novel whose tensile strength outruns its drag. You can see the weld lines, and the book is wiser for not hiding them. It gives more fullness to its argument than to some of its people. Even so, its slacker passages keep chewing the problem. Its driest jokes keep the material from turning holy. Its sharpest claims keep scraping back into mind. Melanie is unforgettable. Rosemary is exasperating in exactly the productive way. And the late coda, for all the strain it introduces, refuses easier consolations than the novel has earned.
Half-buried boat, dead tree, and widening sand turn absence itself into an afterimage, where love, matter, and memory persist without needing to remain intact.
When the plot has finished moving, what remains is not doctrine but deposit: grit, attrition, recurrence. Not locking the thing away. Not backing it up forever. Not launching a cleaner copy into the dark and calling that survival. Letting what matters pass through sleep, damage, mutation, burial, and return in another form, if it returns at all. The old dream stored the world. Unferth’s less consoling dream lets it sift beyond storage, grain by grain, into something too alive to sit still on a shelf.
These small studies search for the book’s governing balance: box against dune, shelter against drift, and two human figures held between storage and exposure.
At the underdrawing stage, the painting reveals its quiet architecture, letting threshold, horizon, and negative space establish the emotional pressure before color arrives.
With the first washes laid in, the image begins to breathe, as light, atmosphere, and the book’s tension between intimacy and erosion enter the frame together.
The swatch sheet translates the cover’s blues, rusts, and pale lights into a review palette, showing how mood is built chromatically before the finished image takes hold.
This test sheet shows the painting becoming a literary object, as border, title, author name, and signature are worked into the image’s larger logic of containment and erosion.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
March 24, 2026
A fantastically written speculative novel about mortality and humanity’s relationships with technology, nature, each other - and the earth and universe at large.
With its focus on Mars colonies, underwater/desert laboratories, ‘depop’ (depopulation), AI and biotech implants, it could easily be labelled dystopian, yet it’s infused with more optimism, tenderness and philosophical musing than most in the genre, and reads stylistically more like a contemporary work of literature rather than a straightforward hard sci-fi work - focused far more on the emotion rather than scientific concepts, though not without the latter.
Highly recommend this title - notably one of, if not the only, science fiction novel published by Daunt Books. Five stars! Can’t wait for it to officially release so I can recommend it to all properly.
With its focus on Mars colonies, underwater/desert laboratories, ‘depop’ (depopulation), AI and biotech implants, it could easily be labelled dystopian, yet it’s infused with more optimism, tenderness and philosophical musing than most in the genre, and reads stylistically more like a contemporary work of literature rather than a straightforward hard sci-fi work - focused far more on the emotion rather than scientific concepts, though not without the latter.
Highly recommend this title - notably one of, if not the only, science fiction novel published by Daunt Books. Five stars! Can’t wait for it to officially release so I can recommend it to all properly.
Did Not Finish
March 6, 2026Thank you NetGalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review.
Sadly, I DNF’d at 28%. The choppiness, lack of syntax and order, and plot that had about as much structure as an overcooked noodle legit made me motion sick. I don’t know what was happening. I don’t think I want to know.
Sadly, I DNF’d at 28%. The choppiness, lack of syntax and order, and plot that had about as much structure as an overcooked noodle legit made me motion sick. I don’t know what was happening. I don’t think I want to know.
June 11, 2026
When I pick up any book by Deb Olin Unferth, I always know that I am in for a wonderfully weird and creative story. In her latest novel, Earth 7, the world has depopulated, and most of the people who survived have abandoned Earth. Those who have stayed are wanders, derelicts, and researchers trying to figure out how to recreate a new Earth by collecting a bank of DNA. Dylan’s mother is one of those researchers, and when she is a kid, they move to a living pod submerged in the ocean. Dylan grows up watching her mother do research and wanting nothing more than to escape the pod, go to the surface, and be away from her mother. When she is a teenager, Dylan’s mother arranges for her to be an intern at the research facility where she worked before they moved, and once at the research facility, Dylan does not know what do to with herself. The earth she is now exploring for the first tine is covered in sand, like a desert, and she decides she will spend all day outside, sweeping and researching sand, knowing that there are secrets in the sand that might open up the future.
At one point, the research facility pays for her to have a vacation. On this vacation she meets Melanie, a bartender who was a former contestant on a plastic surgery reality show. She has had so much surgery that she is now mistaken for an android. She could also possibly be immortal. The two of them find companionship in a world that is lonely and desolate, and dying more and more everyday. While this is happening, Dylan focuses most of her attention on research, which is the research her mother and her colleagues were doing long before her. This work is her way of trying to be immortal, but as they grow older, the population continues to decline and disappear, and all that is left is her efforts. The isolation these two characters feel, the turning of the earth back to a place before it was inhabited by humans is a slow process, but a process nonetheless.
There are many broad ideas, things that are hinted toward but not always fully explored in Earth 7. Some of this is to leave the reader to think about the creeping death that the Earth faces, and when everything is covered in sand and life is either abandoned or rough enough to want to be abandoned, will we try to recreate what was already destroyed or going somewhere else to live. We have had many books about the decolonization of Earth for another planet that we can destroy, but the idea of Earth 7 is that is might be just as easy to recreate it. Neither options are very viable, but Dylan and the rest of the researchers feel like it is worth a try. This is a book that can get the reader thinking until they feel the serious depression and doom coming in the future. For a short novel with big questions, the writing seems to wane toward the final quarter. I struggled finishing this novel. The first 75% is entertaining, filled with interesting ideas, whimsy, and a human element to a place that no longer has much. The final section spans a vast amount of time, trying to answer the question that Unferth proposed, and while it is a noble effort and a way for some of the loose threads to be knotted up (threads that honestly are kind of forgotten by this point), there is a feeling that they might have been better left unanswered. The broad overstrokes of the last quarter is also a switch from the intimate, character driven story into a story about the huge ramifications of the end of civilization. And maybe it is because in my mind Deb Olin Unferth’s writing always has a sense of a quirkiness and fun so when it becomes more serious and introspective, I am waiting for the punchline. This did not come, so maybe my expectations is more at fault than the story. Either way I really enjoy Unferth’s work and her writing is compelling in a way that even though this is not her strongest novel, everything that she writes is worth reading because it is very funny, weird, creative, and enjoyable.
I received this as an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
At one point, the research facility pays for her to have a vacation. On this vacation she meets Melanie, a bartender who was a former contestant on a plastic surgery reality show. She has had so much surgery that she is now mistaken for an android. She could also possibly be immortal. The two of them find companionship in a world that is lonely and desolate, and dying more and more everyday. While this is happening, Dylan focuses most of her attention on research, which is the research her mother and her colleagues were doing long before her. This work is her way of trying to be immortal, but as they grow older, the population continues to decline and disappear, and all that is left is her efforts. The isolation these two characters feel, the turning of the earth back to a place before it was inhabited by humans is a slow process, but a process nonetheless.
There are many broad ideas, things that are hinted toward but not always fully explored in Earth 7. Some of this is to leave the reader to think about the creeping death that the Earth faces, and when everything is covered in sand and life is either abandoned or rough enough to want to be abandoned, will we try to recreate what was already destroyed or going somewhere else to live. We have had many books about the decolonization of Earth for another planet that we can destroy, but the idea of Earth 7 is that is might be just as easy to recreate it. Neither options are very viable, but Dylan and the rest of the researchers feel like it is worth a try. This is a book that can get the reader thinking until they feel the serious depression and doom coming in the future. For a short novel with big questions, the writing seems to wane toward the final quarter. I struggled finishing this novel. The first 75% is entertaining, filled with interesting ideas, whimsy, and a human element to a place that no longer has much. The final section spans a vast amount of time, trying to answer the question that Unferth proposed, and while it is a noble effort and a way for some of the loose threads to be knotted up (threads that honestly are kind of forgotten by this point), there is a feeling that they might have been better left unanswered. The broad overstrokes of the last quarter is also a switch from the intimate, character driven story into a story about the huge ramifications of the end of civilization. And maybe it is because in my mind Deb Olin Unferth’s writing always has a sense of a quirkiness and fun so when it becomes more serious and introspective, I am waiting for the punchline. This did not come, so maybe my expectations is more at fault than the story. Either way I really enjoy Unferth’s work and her writing is compelling in a way that even though this is not her strongest novel, everything that she writes is worth reading because it is very funny, weird, creative, and enjoyable.
I received this as an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
5/5
A remarkable and distinctive piece of science fiction. Like most great examples of the genre, it's a bit of a mess, with writing quirks that are on the brink of aggravating me (the parenthetical intrusions are near-endless), seemingly five different endings written back-to-back, and an unstructured desire to go off on philosophical tangents in the voice of an unknown narrator. But in the end I can't help but love all of that because it's all just so human, and it coalesces into something that feels meaningful and heartfelt. It's such a strange and untethered piece, with its plot beats seemingly designed as a natural step-by-step distancing from the starting point, leaving its arc not in the hands of particular characters but in the overarching weight of their collective story.
I received the eARC for this more than two months ago, and it wasn't until today that I actually picked it up. And while I wish I had done so sooner, I'm glad, in a way, that I read it without even the vaguest memory of the book's plot blurb. It would have been an unexpected journey regardless, but I didn't even know what step 2 would be: a girl lives in a bubble in the ocean, what happens next? I finished this in one sitting (it's pretty short at around 250 pages), and it wrung the energy out of me, but I think after a reading slump full of false starts and broken habits, my body needed this and wouldn't let me let go until it was done.
It's been a long time since I read Simon Jimenez's The Vanished Birds, but I think I've sort of spent that entire time waiting for something to give me the same feeling that novel did. And while this is shorter and leans more literary, it was ultimately up to the task. The universe is large and it lives on with or without us, but we are vast, too: Our journeys are long and composed of relationships, moments, losses, regrets, and then we live on as memories, or perhaps as microchips, waves sent back from space, soul globules that watch eternity change.
A remarkable and distinctive piece of science fiction. Like most great examples of the genre, it's a bit of a mess, with writing quirks that are on the brink of aggravating me (the parenthetical intrusions are near-endless), seemingly five different endings written back-to-back, and an unstructured desire to go off on philosophical tangents in the voice of an unknown narrator. But in the end I can't help but love all of that because it's all just so human, and it coalesces into something that feels meaningful and heartfelt. It's such a strange and untethered piece, with its plot beats seemingly designed as a natural step-by-step distancing from the starting point, leaving its arc not in the hands of particular characters but in the overarching weight of their collective story.
I received the eARC for this more than two months ago, and it wasn't until today that I actually picked it up. And while I wish I had done so sooner, I'm glad, in a way, that I read it without even the vaguest memory of the book's plot blurb. It would have been an unexpected journey regardless, but I didn't even know what step 2 would be: a girl lives in a bubble in the ocean, what happens next? I finished this in one sitting (it's pretty short at around 250 pages), and it wrung the energy out of me, but I think after a reading slump full of false starts and broken habits, my body needed this and wouldn't let me let go until it was done.
It's been a long time since I read Simon Jimenez's The Vanished Birds, but I think I've sort of spent that entire time waiting for something to give me the same feeling that novel did. And while this is shorter and leans more literary, it was ultimately up to the task. The universe is large and it lives on with or without us, but we are vast, too: Our journeys are long and composed of relationships, moments, losses, regrets, and then we live on as memories, or perhaps as microchips, waves sent back from space, soul globules that watch eternity change.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
In this grim future dystopia, most of Earth has been reclaimed by sand, with humans either escaping to Mars or to underwater pods in the ocean. Dylan has been raised by her single scientist mother Rosemary in an isolated sea pod. Rosemary has been working with a surface team to try to preserve the DNA of as many of Earth’s species as possible as part of a historical record and in hope that they could be brought back to life in the future. To put it mildly, Rosemary’s Mom does little to no mothering, and mostly wants Dylan to keep as quiet and unintrusive as possible
Rosemary eventually escapes this suffocating underwater existence by landing a made-up internship with the surface scientific team. Rosemary emerges from the ocean’s depths with little experience in social interactions and little outward ambition. Mainly confining herself to sweeping back sand from the lab’s headquarters, she discovers a dormant life form that rehydrates briefly when exposed to water and then can return for years to stasis. It’s in these tiny creatures that Rosemary realizes that DNA could be stored, ironically taking her mother’s life work to the next level.
There’s lots of pondering throughout the book about the deeper meaning of life- and of all the elements that create us getting repeatedly recycled in in the vast universe.
But what makes the book most fun is Dylan’s emergent relationship with Zee. a human she meets and falls in love with on a one-week vacation getaway. The catch: after having so much implants and augmentation as part of a celebrity surgeon’s reality TV show, everyone assumes that Zee’s a robot. As the book evolves, so does Zee’s humanity.
Thanks to Graywolf Press and NetGalley for an advance reader’s copy.
Rosemary eventually escapes this suffocating underwater existence by landing a made-up internship with the surface scientific team. Rosemary emerges from the ocean’s depths with little experience in social interactions and little outward ambition. Mainly confining herself to sweeping back sand from the lab’s headquarters, she discovers a dormant life form that rehydrates briefly when exposed to water and then can return for years to stasis. It’s in these tiny creatures that Rosemary realizes that DNA could be stored, ironically taking her mother’s life work to the next level.
There’s lots of pondering throughout the book about the deeper meaning of life- and of all the elements that create us getting repeatedly recycled in in the vast universe.
But what makes the book most fun is Dylan’s emergent relationship with Zee. a human she meets and falls in love with on a one-week vacation getaway. The catch: after having so much implants and augmentation as part of a celebrity surgeon’s reality TV show, everyone assumes that Zee’s a robot. As the book evolves, so does Zee’s humanity.
Thanks to Graywolf Press and NetGalley for an advance reader’s copy.
June 18, 2026
Thank you to Graywolf Press and Netgalley for this ARC! Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7 covers the vastness and expanse of “alive-ness”. Of sand, Tardigrades, underwater pod living… Its impactful setting moves the story to places that typical Sci-Fi does not. Despite this novel taking place during the aftermath of depopulation and Earthly destruction (and generations beyond), this Mad Max-esque setting presents the perfect background for a story on isolation, grief, and finding meaning. It transports the readers to both the simplicity and intricacy of human life — what does it mean to be human? Do we really deserve to survive tragedy? What happens when we do? Do we preserve what we have or do we start over in another way? How do others feel about us? How do we feel about ourselves? Being able to see into these burning questions being answered through characters’ mind’s eye, simple actions, love stories, and conversations lets readers dive into the depths of their own souls and how they view the Earthly plane. Earth 7 explores the complexities of humanity and its worth in a poetic manner, allowing readers to contemplate existentialism; how every living being is a part of the particles of Earth itself, forever expanding into the vastness of the universe and impacting it. As Deb Olin Unferth says, “All matter has a will, and we would know that if we understood how to see it, all collective matter too. Even space has a will, even emptiness has a will. And not more right or good than other worlds, not more interesting… But it is hers.” (p. 216-17) Earth 7 may be about a scientific future, but it provides lessons that readers could use in the now. While they still have it.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I know it's only February, but I'm going to go ahead and say this is one of my favorite books of 2026. I was absolutely blown away from page one. The writing style is poetic and philosophical, giving shades of books like A Psalm for the Wild Built and Station Eleven. The character-driven story is immediately immersive, starting out with a scientist taking her young daughter to live in isolation in a pod beneath the sea. That section is pretty difficult to read as someone who grew up in an isolating, abusive environment, but it also rang extremely true to life, and we get a reprieve when the daughter, who becomes the story's central character, escapes the pod to make her own life in the sand. The only criticism I could make is that I wish it were longer, only so that I could spend more time in this world and with these characters.
I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Earth 7 was one of those books that seemed wonderfully suited to my reading tastes when I read the promotional material, but that never really engaged me. The general ideas piqued my interest: female central characters, life on a ravaged earth, housing constructed on the sea floor and in deserts, a bit of lesbian romance, some science, some mysticism—but I felt at a distance the entire time I was reading. The central characters were limited in ways that make sense in context, but that didn't make me feel compelled to spend time with them.
The author is well-respected and general ratings for this book have been good, so don't make a choice based on what I have to say. Consider some other perspectives first
I received an electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss+; the opinions are my own.
The author is well-respected and general ratings for this book have been good, so don't make a choice based on what I have to say. Consider some other perspectives first
I received an electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss+; the opinions are my own.
March 27, 2026
This book is unlike any other. Without giving anything away, I can say that the setting in the book was compelling because it was fascinating. A bunch of science verbiage and subject matter had me confused towards the end, but I was moved nonetheless by the stakes the mother and daughter both had as individuals. Two very different characters that paved the way for humanity’s future.
It left me hopeful for this Earth; that it’s not too late and the damage we’ve already done isn’t permanent.
Thank you to the publisher for this advanced readers copy. I preordered a copy to sit beside “Barn 8” on my bookshelf.
It left me hopeful for this Earth; that it’s not too late and the damage we’ve already done isn’t permanent.
Thank you to the publisher for this advanced readers copy. I preordered a copy to sit beside “Barn 8” on my bookshelf.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This had a slow start for me, and I wanted to love the book more than I did. I think the premise is fantastic, and the author is clearly a gifted writer. Looking at her other work, she seems to be telling stories unlike anybody else. I really enjoyed the character development, and I was rooting for them. The book was fine, but I don't feel compelled to give it more than three stars. I am sure there are many people who might love this more than I did.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
June 9, 2026
Imagine that we’ve destroyed the planet, and humanity is struggling. Rosemary, a scientist, opts to take her young daughter to live in a pod beneath the ocean. Dylan grows up alone with her mother, and cannot wait to leave, but when she finally does, she’s not used to being around people. She becomes a groundskeeper and begins to discover microscopic bits of life in the sand that surrounds everything. EARTH 7 is an apocalyptic novel that focuses on the fragility of human existence and what might happen if we abnegate responsibility for caring for the earth. https://newbooksnetwork.com/earth-7
June 10, 2026
I wasn't fully convinced. I loved the first 30%, the characters seemed promising. So was the setting. I enjoyed the meditative, dream-like writing style.
However, the plot lost itself along the way. I wish Dylan and Melanie's relationship had been more developed. At some point, the characters were barely fleshed out as other things come into the focus. I had become attached to these characters and I wanted to see them more. Sadly, there were long digression that made the story feel disjointed.
The melancholic ending was a bold choice and it will certainly stay with me.
However, the plot lost itself along the way. I wish Dylan and Melanie's relationship had been more developed. At some point, the characters were barely fleshed out as other things come into the focus. I had become attached to these characters and I wanted to see them more. Sadly, there were long digression that made the story feel disjointed.
The melancholic ending was a bold choice and it will certainly stay with me.
Did Not Finish
June 3, 2026DNF’ed 15% in. This is a cast of “it’s not the book, it’s me.” I’m just not vibing with the short sentence writing style and I don’t care about the characters. The setting is really cool though, the space pods were interesting. I can tell this book leans more litfic scifi rather than more science-y scifi, and that’s just not my cup of tea. I’m sure readers who like Emily St John Mandel would like this book!
My thanks to the publisher and author for providing me with an eARC via NetGalley!
My thanks to the publisher and author for providing me with an eARC via NetGalley!
February 27, 2026
Two stars for intriguing setting of the seafloor at the start. The premise sounded intriguing, but I found the writing stilted in such a way that I couldn’t get into the story. The writing was choppy. Short little tiny sentences. Could not grasp the larger significance of the story, so I did not enjoy. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Author
This is a really really good book. Sci fi plot was minimal but satisfying for someone who needs that (me!).
Overall the book is about meaning and perception in the face of existential horror. It’s raw, and it hurt my heart many times but I could not put it down.
Overall the book is about meaning and perception in the face of existential horror. It’s raw, and it hurt my heart many times but I could not put it down.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.
4.25
What at tender read! I really enjoyed this. Quirky yet deeply reflective and refreshing.
4.25
What at tender read! I really enjoyed this. Quirky yet deeply reflective and refreshing.
June 17, 2026
I couldn't find the narrative.
I just didn't get it.
I just didn't get it.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
One woman grows up in a pod under the sea, another other on land, often mistaken for a robot. In a depopulated planet full of sand, tardigrades and few people, can a molecular code be the answer to humanity’s future away from Earth, and is it worth saving anyway?
Earth 7 is a beautiful, optimistic and strange piece of speculative fiction that ponders what we’re losing, and what the earth might be without us. It’s slippery, profound and often funny. For fans of Ursula le Guin, Jeff Vandemeer and more recently Aerth and In Ascension.
Earth 7 is a beautiful, optimistic and strange piece of speculative fiction that ponders what we’re losing, and what the earth might be without us. It’s slippery, profound and often funny. For fans of Ursula le Guin, Jeff Vandemeer and more recently Aerth and In Ascension.
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