The last night had lasted six months in Britain: half an old year of madness, and mayhem, and near-starvation in the dark. And then, agonizingly slowly, the sun had crawled back into the sky as the planet cruised to a stop, the boundaries of day and night locked forever.
As apocalypses go, this was one no one could have planned for: a cosmic event that stopped the Earth’s rotation. Forever. It took almost a decade for the planet to come to a complete stop, but eventually half the world burned to a crisp and the other half froze, leaving only one tiny strip of habitable land in the twilight now covering the United Kingdom.
That was forty years ago.
Andrew Hunter Murray’s debut novel features scientist Ellen Hopper, a member of the last generation of children born during the Slow. She’s retreated from her family, country, and the crumbling civilization, ending up on a rig in the middle of the frozen Atlantic. A letter from a dying former mentor brings her – very reluctantly – back to a drastically changed London and a secret she doesn’t even know the shape of, much less where to start looking for it. It isn’t long before she’s being chased by government agents, with no way of knowing whether the information they’re after is something they can use, or something they’re trying to hide.
“I always knew the Lord intended to divide the people of the Earth into the damned and the saved. I don’t think anyone expected he would do it with a fucking ruler.”
Starting the book decades after the slowing of the world is, I think, an excellent choice. I’m sure an adventure in middle of a literal world-wide catastrophe would be a great blockbuster movie. But pulling back from the big disaster and showing all the ways that it affected everything makes for a much more complex story. Seeing everything from Ellen Hopper’s point of view – after several years of semi-isolation – gives the reader a first-person account of not just the world she grew up in, but just how much the day-to-day life of the average Londoner can change even in that short amount of time.
And that’s when she’s not dealing with a national coverup, personal betrayals, and shadowy government agents who occasionally result to some shocking violence.
This is primarily a political thriller, but not one that could be cut out and pasted into a present-day setting. Murray has done a lot of work researching the elements that go into this post-apocalyptic setting, many of which answer questions I’ve never thought to ask. How would the climate change if the planet is no longer spinning? What kind of natural disasters would happen from the stress of that big of a change? And for crying out loud, how do you measure time when you no longer have a sunrise or a sunset to measure it with, and what happens when two countries are measuring it differently?
It’s immersive world-building at its best. The author manages to make an entire continent’s worth of space feel claustrophobic, like a world under glass that may gradually run out of food. And air. (A real concern when most of the planet’s vegetation is either fried or frozen.) There are big details like the migration of entire countries, and little details like the fact that in a place where it’s always sunlight, the wealthy are the ones who can afford to make the inside of their homes dark.
Murray carefully plays out the threads from several different storylines at once, revealing both the investigation that’s happening now, and the betrayal in Ellen’s past that made her pull away from her former life. But Ellen and the reader also learn at the same time just how bad things have gotten; the authoritarianism, the starvation and atrocities, the propaganda that encourages people to blame everything except their own government, and all the justifications everyone uses to try to keep doing what they’ve always done even if it’s all turned to poison.
“…if you don’t write the piece you get sacked. And if you’re sacked, you really can’t do anything. Then again, if you’re not doing anything anyway, you might as well get yourself sacked, but then some other bastard will have the decent job and the perks. So you don’t do anything and you hope the person who’d replace you would do it worse.”
That last bit is what keeps a story in a fantastical setting grounded in reality. It’s a very pessimistic view of reality, granted, but the I’ve Got Mine So Everyone Else Can Go To Hell attitude feels familiar. Sure, the individual actions by the governments are different (a barrier of scuttled ships around the coastline rather than an economic withdrawal or an expensive wall on the southern border) but it’s all based on the idea that no matter how much privation and repression we’re putting our own citizens through, things will automatically be better if we could just keep all those other people out.
Shout-out to Hannah Wallace for recommending the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, which is how I found out about the existence of author Andrew Hunter Murray in the first place.