ust around the corner from our present day of contented ignorance lies the Impact: collision with a huge asteroid that will wipe the Earth clean of life, triggering huge tectonic upheavals that will literally remake the continents. But only one man is hedging mankind's bets for survival. Calvin DeFort has utilized his vast fortune to return to Luna and plant a base in Tycho that will serve as a safeguarded repository of knowledge and frozen biological material. Staffed by self-repairing robots, this enclave is configured for the very long run.
Just before the Impact, in the midst of chaos, the final ship takes off for Tycho, bearing DeFort's cohorts, but unfortunately not himself. Duncan Yare, Pedro Navarro, Diana Lazard, Tanya Wu and Arne Linder are the five selected representatives of mankind, but two others--a security guard named K.C. Kell and his girlfriend Mona Lisa Live--force their way onboard at gunpoint. But once on the moon, the bickering seven fall into a stable relationship as the last survivors of the race.
Over the next several million years, these seven will be cloned over and over again by their Robo nursemaids, in the battle to re-establish humanity as a viable race, first on Earth and then among the stars. Invariably echoing the interpersonal arrangements among their originals, the clones will thrash out their differences over and over as they hatch various plans to reseed Earth. Their historian, the Duncan Yare clone, will narrate the long chronicle, in a tone both hopeful and wistful.
After the Earth has finally cooled, the first attempt to unleash a resurgent ecology is undertaken, to be met by some curious mutant terrestrial survivors. Eventually, the generations oversee the arising of a new Earth city, populated by more clones and other stored genotypes. But this first renaissance is undone by alien panspermia: a move by unknown others to colonize our planet from the stars. From this point on, the Earth is a battleground of species.
A terraforming tale told by a titan
Jack Williamson invented the very word "terraforming," and in this fresh, ingenious novel he proves that--at age 93--he still owns bragging rights to the concept. Without delving over-deeply into the actual mechanics of such a hypothetical global re-engineering, a la Kim Stanley Robinson or Pamela Sargent, Williamson nonetheless zeroes in on the emotional and spiritual aspects of playing god, and delivers an adventure-packed saga full of an old-fashioned but eternally relevant sense of wonder.
Williamson's elegy for the death of Earth is affecting, but occupies only a small portion of the book. What he's more concerned with are the odd and eerie ways in which evolution would recreate the ecosphere (albeit with help from the Lunarians). Consider this description of a new kind of locust plague: "The bugs ate the plastic geodomes and all our supplies inside. They ate the forest and the grass. They killed and ate the hoppers, bones and all. They shed and ate their wings. They died and ate the dead. They're all gone now, nothing alive but their eggs in the dust, waiting for wind and water to bring new seed from anywhere to let the land revive, while they hatch and multiply and wait to kill again." This is near-Biblical poetry, a view of Nature as a merciless, basically ineffable force, larger than any of mankind's conceptions.
Williamson also posits a cyclical view of progress and destruction, an almost Oriental philosophy, opposed to such uninterrupted Western ascents to triumph as offered by Robinson and Sargent. Even his supermen find themselves facing threats they cannot master. It's a lesson in humility not often found in SF.
Employing his patented icons such as the supernaturally beautiful alien girl, and utilizing some old tropes, such as the brain-controlling parasite (readers will think of Burroughs' similar Martian race), Williamson nonetheless deploys up-to-the-minute concepts such as nanotech, and in fact ends up sounding like Greg Bear by the novel's conclusion. But the authors he is most closely allied with are three: Stapledon, Clarke and Simak. Blending the cosmic perspectives of the first two with the sentimental humanism of the latter, Williamson has forged a postapocalyptic Odyssey where the sailor never really reaches home, but finds the journey still worthwhile.
