A stunning vision of life on a parallel Earth (or two)

Welcome to planet Aerth. In what seems to be an analogue of our solar system, the third planet from the Sun hosts a gentler society than the earthly one in which you’re reading this: it’s agricultural, ecologically minded, governed by a town-hall politics built around secular pieties and matriarchal “mentors” for young men. The Hippocratic oath, “First do no harm”, is consistently applied at every scale. This is an innocent version of humanity for whom even telling a lie is unthinkable.

But the people of Aerth face a new ice age and a population-culling virus. So, despite their technological limitations – self-imposed by their sense of ecological responsibility – they’ve tentatively begun to colonise Mars with jerry-rigged vessels, and in the process discovered a new planet, Urth, a second parallel Earth which had been hidden by the Sun. (Whether or not any of this is astrophysically possible, we’re swept along by the conceit: it’s more allegory than hard sci-fi.) Urth can be reached only via a sojourn on the inhospitable red planet to break the journey.

At first, the citizens of Aerth have no plan to make the voyage to this alternate homeworld, but as the Martian crops fail, the explorers launch a rudimentary ship towards Urth, on a thrilling voyage crewed by, among others, our protagonist Magnus. As a child, he’d grown tired of the homilies of his benign, matriarchal mentor, and developed an ambition to join the pioneers – much to his aging parents’ alarm – then, entering adulthood, he lost the love of his life; after that, he chose to take the risk of travelling to another world. And yet, as the ship arrives, a violent landing kills all the crew except him – leaving him stranded.

Deborah Tomkins’s book, winner of the first Novella Award from small publisher Weatherglass – judged by Ali Smith – is composed of concise chapters, never more than two or three pages long and sometimes as brief as a paragraph. Tomkins is an accomplished writer of flash fiction, so she excels in this style: the brief spotlit moment, the isolated detail, each section somewhere between poetry and prose. It’s also a fine way to carry a complex plot with pace and filmic clarity. Years pass between brief scenes; Magnus is in his fifties by the narrative’s close. Tomkins can use the full scale of her imagination – there are so many ideas here, anchored in a human story of love, conflict, regret.

This might just have been a story, beautifully told, about the sublime beauty of space, and it does bear some comparison to Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning novel Orbital, albeit with a fanciful twist. But Magnus’s crash-landing suddenly opens it all up as a contemporary Swiftian satire. Urth turns out to be more like Earth than Aerth is, in its geopolitics, its ravenous attitude to its own resources, its pollution and overcrowding. For Magnus this is a disorienting voyage to another reality, as he becomes at once a feted celebrity and an unwelcome immigrant, victimised by politicians, conspiracy theorists and talk shows. (Urth has found no evidence of Aerth’s existence, so some people don’t believe his story.) Thus our hero descends from celebrated ingenue to potential terrorist to down-and-out; his best chance – for Aerth and Urth seem, in some ways, mysteriously in sync – may be to track down his Urth-bound doppelganger, even at the cost of bending reality.

A disorienting journey for Magnus, a disorienting homecoming for us: as the plot skims along, Tomkins shows us our own way of life at a rare and curious remove. It’s hardly a new observation that an alien race capable of travelling across space might find us frighteningly self-destructive, but what comes through here, superbly depicted, is how shabby, incompetent and cruel we look compared to a race identical to us in everything but circumstance. This novella, so concisely written, is a triumph: both an intelligent sci-fi thriller and a thought-provoking parable.

Aerth is published by Weatherglass at £10.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 5030 or visit Telegraph Books