Paul AwadRecensioni

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.

It took me a bit to realize that this is a YA novel…a very YA novel. The emotional contradictions were jarring for me, but of course they will not be so for a teenager. The “Curators” are emotionless, except when they’re angry and spiteful and hate you. And a few other silly things: like why the Earth is expected to die, and so quickly; and from where all the money to build the project comes; and how does one connect across the multiverses, much less transfer across them.

But, if we read this on a more simplistic level, it has all the elements that a YA will like: tension and complexity, without the interference of adult logic. The confusion created by the early chapters bouncing back and forth between the same characters in different realities with different histories is finally eliminated as the book ends with the bad guy becoming a good guy just in time to finally save the project…and all life on Earth? The only problem left for the next book to explain is how many people—and who—get to go to the new planet. Surely the authors must know that a lot more people will be needed to prevent inbreeding and destroying everything they worked for. The few people and animals that are packed in this “ark” are nowhere near enough to resuscitate an extinct human species.

But, I’m quibbling. After the books I’ve been reading, before this one, have set me up to expect more from a novel, I was primed to not like this one. This is complex story with crossed multi-verse life-lines—plus time-lines—such that it would require a much larger book to contain the potential that this story presents. I give the authors kudos for trusting children to understand and emotionally connect to the characters. At some future time, if I lend this book to someone who is eager to read the sequel, I will enthusiastically buy it for him/her.

This was an interesting and fun book to read. The story follows a woman named Constance in parallel universes as she tries to discover a secret about her past on Earth on one, and in the other tries to save herself and a number of other humans aboard a doomed spaceship. The story flips back and forth in a very clear manner between stories, with each chapter labelled Earth or Orb. Some people may think that this reduces the mystery, but the stories are clearly different, even as they mirrored each other in action. While I was reading I had forgotten the plot intro on the back, and I actually spent time trying to figure out the connection between the two stories. I thought of different timelines with flashbacks, or whether they had a consciousness transfer, or computer programming long before I thought of parallel universes. This could have been an interesting idea to play with for the first book in a planned series, but I can understand not going in that direction. I found the space plot to be the more compelling of the two, but it is more of an external conflict; Constance of that world has an immanent danger of their ship crashing and everyone dying, while Constance of the world closer to our own has an inward conflict "What happened in my past, what are the secrets, etc." This does give the book a reason to appeal to a wider variety of readers, as they may find more enjoyment with one plot or the other and still appreciate the book as a whole. It's a pretty solid entry for a first book in a series by a small publishing house, and it's worth reading.

A delightful read that pulled me in from page one!! This work has most everything I would desire in a store of fantastic imaginings. The book is loaded with ideas and interesting characters that orchestrates a page turning story filled with mystery, suspense, and of course wonder.
I’ve been a reader of science fiction for years, but have not been so active a reader of late. Paul Awad and Kathryn O’Sullivan’s fine book most definitely lead me back to the reasons why I first became in-love with this genre. I also found enjoyed some connections to elements of past science fiction films in the book, and the short chapter format rocks!! It fuels the excitement.
I highly recommend it for all readers who will find Lots! to enjoy.

I think duel universes is always a solid starting point for a sci-fi story. And I like the way you are given both stories simultaneously without ever losing track of which universe you are in at any given moment. But some things in this story just didn't come together for me. Especially with Nicolas saving all of humankind. I was never really sure how what he did proved what it was supposed to prove. And at the end there were a couple of things that were kind of resolved but still left me with questions. And there were times when situations were presented with more gravitas then they actually ended up having. Probably to build tension and suspense, but what it led to was me being a little disappointed with the solution. You have a spaceship and all souls on board about to be destroyed by Jupiter's gravity, creepy Curators running around and you don't know if they are friend or foe, experiments into traveling between universes, and a young boy who has to make some life and death decisions. There should be tension and suspense enough without forcing it. I did like the concept of the Curators, what they were and where they came from. And they were suitably creepy. I liked Nicolas and you did care what happened to him. And towards the end there was a good amount of tension and suspense that kept you reading. For me the good and not so good balanced out into an okay story. It is neither great nor bad.

I received this book for for free from librarything.com in return for an unbiased review.

The first half or so of the book the chapters alternate between 2 stories with the same characters. In one story, Constance is on a seemingly derelict spaceship, called the Orb, in a failing orbit around Jupiter. A mysterious group, apparently aliens, the Curators, have stranded her and her crew mates to die.

In the other story, Constance is meeting with the mysterious benefactor of her life, the Foundation of Scientific Investigation at its headquarters at the Wallops Flight Facility, a NASA facility on the coast of Virginia.

At first it appears that the story on the Orb takes place at a later time than the story at Wallops, but soon it appears that the stories are in alternative universes, although apparently happening at the same time, if that means anything in a multiverse situation.

The multiverse is pretty popular these days with 2 recent Marvel movies touting the concept.

I've given the book a rating of 3, but it's a pretty tepid 3. I liked the opening chapters. The goings on on the Orb were pretty mysterious but it seemed like a resolution would come. The Curators had apparently been trying to same humanity from their fate of self-destruction but had somehow lost faith in this particular group of humans they were trying to save.

On Wallops Island, Constance learns that her parents had once worked for FSI but her mother was killed in an experiment there that her father would never talk about. He himself died a few years later as a consequence of the same accident.

Later in the book, the stories begin to blend as somehow the multiverses start to interact. This part of the book I found too confused and more like magic than anything else.

Who are the Curators and why are they trying to save us? What does it mean to save a species when it exists in multiple universes?

This is the first of a planned trilogy. I'm afraid I'm not interested in the characters enough to look for the sequels.

--ARC provided by LibraryThing and Secant Publishing in exchange for an honest review.--

"When Earth Shall Be No More" is a well-imagined SF novel, but not fully realized in the execution. The premise is a strong one, playing out a plot that requires mingling between separate multiverse-streams to resolve. There is good planning behind the backstory of the main plot, and in the nature of the Curators themselves. I did become quite invested in the story and some characters, particularly Nicholas.

However, the pacing for the first 2/3 of the novel is ragged; it's tough enough for a reader when the author(s) choose to jump back and forth rapidly between Thread A and Thread B in brief bites, but necessary data is repeatedly withheld, hindering the development. It's as if this is a working draft that wants a bit more fleshing out. There were also two primary cast-related problems for me. First, the main character of Thread A, Constance (Earth), is not given much range of reaction/emotion: she either behaves defensively and curtly with adults or in a hovering, micro-managing way to her 10-year-old son. Whatever depth she may have, we don't get to see it, so she plays out like a wire-frame more than a fleshed-out person. The second is with the Curators: the revelation of their nature is a highlight of the novel, but they are so little _questioned_ until then that it seems as if the authors expect the reader to somehow apprehend the significance intended for them without actually showing it.

Maybe this would have been an exceptional release in 1982, but the competition for shelf space in SFF now includes the likes of Reynolds, Tchaikovsky, Martine, and Flynn; this is simply not written to that calibre. Also, for the Love of Whatever: it's "garbage chute" NOT "garbage shoot."½

An awesome sci-fi thriller. My favorite character was Nicolas He has a lot of adventures with automatons, interstellar travel, and just being a kid.

This is a nice science fiction, adventure book. The story is told dually and joins near the middle to bring it all together. There's a lot of mystery and action. I enjoyed it, and highly recommend it. Received a complimentary copy from #secantpublishing and wasn't under any obligation to leave a positive review. #whentheearthshallbenomore

Earth is in trouble and an alien race that has been living among them have decided they are worth saving or are they?

We watch as Constance Roy tries to understand what is happening to her and her colleagues ... and her son, as they are whisked off to some place new but certain powers want to stop even that.

An easy read and very well done.