Review of Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan

Given the deluge of culture the past decade or so, the longevity of success has been shortened. Where the names of well received books released in the mid-20th century still linger, successes in the past couple of decades have faded more quickly as each successive success is released. But do you remember Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven? Erin Swan still does, and she wants to be in dialogue and iterate upon it in Walk the Vanished Earth (2022).

Walk the Vanished Earth is a generational story kicked off by a pregnant, cognitively limited young woman named Bea emerging from the woods of rural Kansas in the 1970s. Selectively mute, she is cared for by the state who ultimately assists with the birth, a stunted boy Bea calls 'her giant'. The boy is named Paul, and he goes on to live in interesting times, aka the general collapse of world civilization after environmental catastrophe. Paul's head full of ideas how to overcome the catastrophe, he puts them into motion, starting with his own daughter. Her story, and the generations of her children carry the story forward in episodic fashion, telling what happens to the human race in the aftermath of disaster.

Walk the Vanished Earth is structured as concatenated story. Each chapter features the next generation of Bea's offspring. But this linear progression is framed by what is ostensibly a young woman living on Mars with two people she calls uncles. Their existence possessing a bit of mystery, little is initially known about the state of the three's habitation, physiology, and environment except that it is not Earth standard. Human-esque is the initial impression. As the novel progresses, Swan occasionally returns to Mars, with the final chapter closing the loop as to how the Mars setting relates to what happens on Earth.

Swan handles this ambitious and atypical structure well. In fact, it is the strongest point about the novel to recommend. Hearing the sounds emitted in the opening reflect back in complementary echoes throughout the subsequent chapters is a satisfying loop and the engine turning the pages.

But to what end is this concept in place? Like St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Swan uses the structure of Walk the Vanished Earth to highlight how good we've had it the past century or so—the benefits of technology, the abundance of resources, the layers of support in society, and the overall high quality of life we modern humans have. But Swan adds her own angle of commentary to this: the shortsightedness with which we intelligent monkeys can approach problem solving when encountering large-scale catastrophes like that in the novel. It's in this that the novel stretches its science fiction legs to move away from Station Eleven in futuristic fashion.

My notes of Walk the Vanished Earth are full of question marks. Where is this going? Why this scene? This character? As mentioned, the conclusion wraps things up, but it's not with a pretty bow. Rather than a tight, focused narrative with railroad tracks toward a destination, Walk the Vanished Earth pauses to smell the flowers here, visits this place there, and generally rambles its road with only a limited sense of focus beyond chapter structure. Another way of looking at this is, Swan seems to have had a great idea how to frame the novel, but less ideas how to fill it on a line by line, paragraph by paragraph basis. At this level of detail, the novel is not always on point.

Diction and dialogue are a good example of this. There are occasional nice turns of phrase, but there are likewise occasional awkward turns of phrase. Seemingly random details are added to scenes, details that don't always form a silent bulwark to deepen character or thematic intentions. And characterization, particularly the singularity of characters, is weak. Like David Mitchell's novels (for example Cloud Atlas), the reader would hope such a layered story is full of distinguishable characters. There are some, but by and large Swan struggles to give each memorable presence.

In the end, the strengths of Walk the Vanished Earth are found in its bones and hints of theme. Swan has written a story that is engaging for its atypical structure and substance, two things which are reasonably well-developed. But its muscles and skin are a work in progress. The novel is readable, but style and characterization are not always robust. Like many stories in our current golden age of culture, Walk the Vanished Earth feels like a novel that spent too much time workshopped by fellow authors. All the edges, edges that might have defined the novel (for better and worse), have been filed off, diluting its identity. Despite these shortcomings, however, the book is still recommended. The relevancy of theme—civilization, appreciation, state of society—is significant.