Space Race — Colonizing the Stars — Alternative Universes — Soviets?

Just finished: Do You Dream of Terra-Two? Temi Oh

Now reading: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

On deck: ??? Stay tuned!

In 2016, I was dating someone who had a decent enough telescope and a decent enough 3D printer that I was able to attach the body of my 35mm camera up through the mount he had printed and take a picture of the moon. It’s a waning gibbous, center of the shot, black space around the slice of gray-white. You can see the shadow covering the rest of the moon, just barely different from where it’s sitting so far away from us. I keep one copy of the photo tucked into the frame of my dresser mirror, and I look at it, sometimes, and remember that people once went there. Most of my childhood was marked by residual space exploration, and the last US Space Shuttle launched a couple of months before my senior year of high school. For a long time, I wanted to live in a world where we could go to Mars and choose, in the same way people choose to move to California, to live there in space instead. My attitudes towards space and space exploration have changed pretty significantly since then: even though there is no sovereignty in space, I don’t think that we as a species have learned how to let go of the desire to possess that it seems like we acquired some 10,000 years ago, and we certainly haven’t been great at following other global doctrines meant to secure, if not peace, then war in which we all follow the rules.

Temi Oh’s Do You Dream of Terra-Two? takes place in an alternative universe where interplanetary travel has been made possible through feats of engineering. The characters are roughly the same age as I was in the year the book takes place—2013—and have all chosen (and been chosen) to crew a twenty-three year mission to Terra-Two, a life-supporting planet circling Alpha Centauri II.

One of my biggest issues when I started to read this book was the pacing; young adult science fiction often has an exposition problem, and I think this is a shared issue with adult science fiction and fantasy, the doorstopper books which feel more like explanations of a universe rather than genuine story. For YA, the issue is that the characters need introduction, and with the varying viewpoints of six different teenagers, that’s a lot of background information that’s getting dumped. This is a genre flaw which this book doesn’t get away from. Part of it might come down to the need to make characters feel relatable to teenagers, but unfortunately, I think that information is better served when it comes out in plot, or in memory, not as buffer to ease readers into a story. The other major issue—which is compounded by the pacing, or maybe makes the pacing an issue to begin with—is that the description of the book is not a description of this particular book.

Spoiler: in space, bad things happen. Space accidents seem to follow the same rule as car accidents in that you are more likely to get into one in your own neighborhood. The crew is meant to rendezvous with a team studying the possibility of terraforming Europa—this is at the climax of the book, so maybe I’m hesitant to say exactly what happens. I think that if you’re someone who has ever watched or read anything with space travel, you can make some assumptions about what the event is. In any case, this is where there’s the real meat of the book, where the characters, who otherwise have been given a lot of idle character building background tasks in the approach to the farther end of the Solar System, actually have to do something and make real choices.

There weren’t, as there were with American Pastoral, many lines that I felt stuck out to me or provided some place where I could think a little more deeply, but I think that comes down to the fact that I’m not a teenager, and haven’t been for the past ten years, I’m not British, and because the prose itself doesn’t lend itself as easily to reflection. Oh focuses sometimes on things that I think have less significant impacts on the overall plot of the book rather than things that I would think would be more relevant in space: I don’t really care about Poppy’s mom’s bad boyfriends, and while it gives at least a little bit (sort of?) of an explanation as to her susceptibility to depression in space (I guess), Juno’s implied eating disorder isn’t explored to nearly the same degree, and I would think that that could have larger ramifications in space—and doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be resolved by being told that if she didn’t start eating more, then she would have to have supervised meals. The lines that do come to mind without having to flip through the book, for me, are mostly cringy: again, I’m not British, but American, so any time the term “Yank” is used—for instance, “The Yanks got the moon, we’ll get a whole planet,” which is said as justification for the UKSA to go to Terra-Two—I want to roll my eyes and take the 45 minute drive up to Boston to throw some blocks of tea into the Harbor like it’s my duty.

Interestingly, Oh seems to play with the idea of British imperialism throughout the novel, from phrases like the above to a discussion about what will actually happen on Terra-Two. While countries have agreed (in the real world and in the novel) that no one state will be able to claim ownership over any places discovered in space, the characters in the novel are divided about the likelihood of that remaining true. The conversation includes a vision of a revived British Empire versus a utopian ideal in which people live in harmony with each other and the planet; the novel wants, even superficially, for us to wonder which is more likely to happen, especially when, towards the end, the teenagers realize that they were selected not necessarily because they were the best, but because they were expendable. Who gets sacrificed in order for power to get what it wants? Are the risks inherent in exploration worth it, and if they are worth it, are they worth it for the scientific aims of the discovery mission, or are they worth it for what they bring back to the states who exploit both mission participants and discovered resources? Unlike some science fiction novelists, like Ray Bradbury, who leaves off all of his work with the distinct sense that scientific progress and space exploration are going too far, too quickly, with little understanding of what the consequences of our desire for more will lead to, Oh gives and ending which implies that, expendability or risks understood, the mission must continue.

That the mission must continue—or that it exists at all—comes from the same misplaced belief that exists in real life about the need to find another life-suitable planet, and that belief comes from thinking that the planet we live on is unable to be saved. Do You Dream of Terra-Two isn’t a dystopian novel, by the way, not anymore so than real life feels dystopian, minus perhaps the British government optioning to send teenagers into space. But I do believe that there is the thought that Earth has been lost, or is so far gone that there might be no desire to attempt to stop or mitigate climate change, and that thinking seems to preempt some tech-minded billionaires to suggest the alternative: terraform Mars, or find another planet. We’ve used up this one. Like spoiled kids who have broken a toy, there’s no concern or desire to try to fix it because there’s always going to be another one to move onto. It’s hard to tell if this criticism actually exists in Do You Dream of Terra-Two, since it seems the things the characters are most concerned about leaving behind are the violent acts of Earthlings, and the things the characters are most concerned about coming with colonists (even that word! Even the use of that word has with it the baggage of colonialism! It’s inescapable!) are those same violent acts. While the promotional copy for the book seems to emphasize the need to leave the planet due to global warming, whoever wrote it wanted this book to be something it isn’t, because climate change doesn’t seem to be a major issue except for one observation that a character makes about winter not feeling quite like winter anymore. Being that this is a book primarily about relationships between people, the concerns of the characters are relationships between themselves, the other characters, and their families who they’ve left behind—not the dying planet Earth. When they miss Earth for its places, those places are situated by the people in them, and whether or not the characters have managed to go to those places. That climate change is an issue in a world in which mankind is able to complete interplanetary travel is the biggest issue I have with this book besides its pacing, given real-world NASA’s active monitoring, research, and assessment of climate change. In a world where we’re able to take high-res photos of a planet as far away as Alpha Centauri, we wouldn’t have been able to identify and stop climate change sooner? In a world where scientists are actively terraforming a totally different kind of planet from Earth, we don’t know enough to reverse our own climate? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that much to the plot, but it does matter more to the theme, and it leaves a hole in the rationale for the mission in the first place, as well as for why it’s so important that the mission continue on.

Then again, the Soviet Union still exists in this novel, so maybe climate change, like the spectre of communism, is present in every universe.

On a totally unrelated note, I haven’t made my next mega book purchase yet (I’m waiting to get stressed out enough that spending $200 on used books will make me feel better). Please send me recommendations; I read almost everything.