WHEN EARTH SHALL BE NO MORE by Paul Awad & Kathryn O’Sullivan

Constance, or Connie, is our main protagonist throughout the story, or should I say stories, that we follow both on earth, and on a spaceship called the Orb.

The Orb is weeks, if not days, away from a final plunge into the atmosphere of Jupiter, and Constance wants to know why the Curators, the “people” in charge of the Orb, don’t seem to be doing anything about it.

The Earth-bound Constance is finally meeting her benefactor of many, many years, but he’s kind of creepy and things aren’t the way Constance had always believed them to be.

This story alternates between two realities/timelines. It’s written in a way that you very quickly know which you’re in, so following along is not confusing. (The chapter titles help too.) Short chapters keep the story, both stories, moving quickly and it’s easy to lose yourself in her plight along the way.
Character building can always be a challenge when many of the same people are in both timelines. Paul Awad and Kahryn O’Sullivan slowly work in most of the characters so we feel like we know them by the end, but they don’t get so in depth you could write up an FBI profile.

You also won’t have your knowledge of technology, astronomy and quantum physics challenged with this book as the authors don’t require us to have a PhD to understand what’s going on.

Probably due to the last two points, another reviewer described this as a Young Adult (YA) book. I definitely wouldn’t go that far. True, if you’re looking to have your intellect challenged, this might not be the book for you. However, if you’re looking to be entertained with a well written science fiction book with some suspense and twists and turns, this one is highly recommended. ( )

An interesting premise but clunky dialogue and an inability to move the plot forward let it down. ( )

In chapters alternating between Earth and The Orb (a space station / generation ship slowly decaying into Jupiter's orbit) we follow Dr. Constance Roy as she tries to save The Orb and pilot it to a new Earth and also meets with the architects of The Orb on Earth.
I feel like saying any more about the plot would give away its twists and turns, so I'll leave it there. Generation ships and the search for Goldilocks planets are a couple of my favorite Sci Fi tropes, so I liked this one well enough. The writing is pretty compelling and a lot of the chapters end on cliffhangers, so it creates impatience and suspense as one has to read about what's going on in the other narrative before the cliffhanger is resolved. This also made it a quick read for me as I finished in one weekend afternoon. ( )

Paul Awad and Kathryn O’Sullivan’s When Earth Shall Be No More tells the story of Dr. Constance Roy, a scientist who finds that the secretive foundation funding her research has mysterious connections to her parents. Sometime in the future, she’s one of one hundred humans aboard the Orb, a space station near Jupiter, who were transported by the Curators to help rebuild humanity after the Earth’s destruction. Awad and O’Sullivan alternate between the events on Earth – where she learns of the predicted threat to the world and her parents’ work involving gene editing and efforts to find probably Goldilocks planets that could be a new home for humanity – and the events on the Orb, where the Curators seem less than benevolent and may not even have a plan for humanity beyond seeing how they behave in the face of impending disaster as the Orb’s orbit decays and it slowly falls toward Jupiter. The more Constance looks into things, the more it appears that the two timelines are blurring into each other.

Elements of the story resemble Carl Sagan’s Contact or Arthur C. Clarke’s speculative science fiction, but the novel’s biggest strength lies in paralleling Constance’s discoveries on Earth with what she learns about the Curators on the Orb. This lends greater dramatic tension to a story that would otherwise feel somewhat formulaic in its story beats. Awad and O’Sullivan similarly work to foreshadow their use of a multiverse theory, but the significance of those story elements only clicks at the moment of the big reveal. Though formulaic at times, When Earth Shall Be No More is a good work of science-fiction that fans of the genre will enjoy as a beach read this summer. ( )

Alternating between two parallel universes, this book tells the stories of two separate but connected groups of people. The first group are the survivors of an Earth that was destroyed, rescued by mysterious beings known as the Curators shortly before the destruction and now faced with the problem of trying to find and get to a new world before the station that they’re on is destroyed by Jupiter’s gravity. In the other universe, on an Earth similar to ours (but probably not actually ours, because it doesn’t seem quite right), several people, mostly that universe’s versions of some of the survivors, are about to meet for the first time. Due to events in the second universe, the versions of one character start having visions of each other and realize that her son in the second universe is vital to saving the survivors in the first.

I had several problems with the story. A relatively minor one was that things sometimes got a little unclear when the two universes were interacting due to having multiple characters with the same name involved; I’m not sure that this could have been avoided, and it isn’t all that bad.

A more significant problem is that the stakes rarely felt particularly high. On the Earth, there were a couple of times late in the story where there was a danger of the son either being killed or separated from his mother forever, but otherwise, nobody seems to have any major goals at the time, especially not ones that are in danger of being thwarted. While the other universe has the threat to the station and survivors, I found it hard to be all that concerned simply because the number of survivors (both humans and animals) was too small to be a viable population even if they did get to a new homeworld. A revelation by one of the Curators partway through seems to imply that the process of saving people had side-effects that meant no number would have resulted in a viable population, but I might have made some incorrect assumptions there. Regardless, successfully reaching a new world would only give humanity a few more generations at best, and a few decades at most given the revelation, so it really didn’t seem to matter all that much.

Finally, the characters largely seemed underdefined to me, especially the ones on the station; of the four dozen survivors, maybe a quarter actually show up and get names, and only four get any sort of personality (two of whom don’t get much screen time before dying). The characters on Earth do better, but the lack of any significant threat (even of the ‘significant to them, even if not to anyone else’ type) means that the reader isn’t often concerned whether they’ll get what they want.

There were also a couple of errors or stylistic decisions that bothered me, although they were really minor things. First, there was one point where the number of survivors was about a dozen lower than it was listed elsewhere; whether a relic of an earlier version of the story, ambiguous wording, or a simple error, this should have been caught at some point. Also, the naming of the (very short) chapters is inconsistent: up until chapter 18, one gets “Chapter 1: Orb,” “Chapter 1: Earth,” “Chapter 2: Orb,” and so on, but then one gets “Chapter 18: Orb” without a corresponding Earth chapter and the remaining chapters just having a number despite mostly only taking place either on Earth or the Orb. ( )