A House Between Earth and the Moon: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

Overview

“Compulsively readable.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Inventive and thrilling. . . . I couldn’t put it down.”
—Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half

“It’s a thrill to read this novel.”
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror

The gripping story of one scientist in outer space, another who watches over him, the family left behind, and the lengths people will go to'protect'the people and planet they love

For twenty years, Alex has believed that his gene-edited super-algae will slow and even reverse the effects of climate change. His obsession with his research has jeopardized his marriage, his relationships with his kids, and his own professional future. When the Son sisters, founders of the colossal tech company Sensus, offer him a chance to complete his research, he seizes the opportunity. The catch? His lab will be in outer space on Parallaxis, the first-ever luxury residential space station built for billionaires. Alex and six other scientists leave Earth and their loved ones to become Pioneers, the beta tenants of Parallaxis.

But Parallaxis is not the space palace they were sold. Day and night, the embittered crew builds the facility under pressure from Sensus, motivated by the promise that their families will join them. At home on Earth, much of the country is ablaze in wildfires and battered by storms. In Michigan, Alex’s teenage daughter, Mary Agnes, struggles through high school with the help of the ubiquitous Sensus phones implanted in everyone’s ears, archiving each humiliation, and wishing she could go to Parallaxis with her father—but her mother will never allow it.

The Pioneers are the beta testers of another program, too: Sensus is designing an algorithm that will predict human behavior. Katherine Son hires Tess, a young social psychologist, to watch the experiment’s subjects through their phones—including not only the Pioneers, but Katherine’s sister, Rachel. Tess begins to develop an intimate, obsessive relationship with her subjects. When Tess and Rachel travel to Parallaxis, the controlled experiment begins to unravel.

Prescient and insightful, A House Between Earth and the Moon is at once a captivating epic about the machinations of big tech and a profoundly intimate meditation on the unmistakably human bonds that hold us together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101980101
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/29/2022
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Scherm is the author of Unbecoming. She lives in California with her family.

Read an Excerpt

1.

Alex had been in space for only six days when Carl Bouchet, who was a real astronaut, told him to put on his suit and go outside.

To "go outside" the station was a procedure that Alex had practiced just twice during his summer of training, and that had been in a zero-gravity simulation chamber. Not the same at all. Carl had assured him then that this was emergency training, to be used only in the unlikely event that he needed their assistance. Maybe the others had been disappointed to hear that, but Alex had taken a deep, quiet breath of relief. He hadn't minded Carl's arrogance, in this context. It made him feel safe.

"Me?" he asked Carl now. "What about Irma? Malik? They're probably more-"

"They're coming, too. Battery refresh." Carl turned away, and when Alex hesitated, Carl turned back, right hand on his belt, where he wore two spools of retractable cording with clips at the end. He started to pull out a line and offered the end to Alex.

"You want a tow?" he asked.

"No, no," Alex said, and he pushed off the wall behind him to follow, pulling up Carl's training sessions in his phone's archive: training, Ground, space walk, "unlikely event." He was certain he remembered nothing. When he found it, he sped up the footage to 4x with captions. Two Carls, now: Carl-of-the-past instructed him, the footage like stained glass over the Carl who floated in front of him. That Carl slid open the door to the suit room. He turned around just as Alex shook his head to stop the video.

"You'll be fine," Carl said.

Inside, their pale, pearly space suits were lined up along the wall. Malik and Irma were already getting dressed, and when they looked up to greet Alex, they did not look afraid, and they did not look like they were reviewing training footage at 4x.

"It's happening," Irma sang.

Alex laughed uncertainly, the only way he laughed lately, and floated toward his own suit. On the wall next to it were three numbered packets of underlayers. Malik and Irma were into their second layers already, full-body leotards that covered them from the tips of their fingers and toes up to the tops of their necks. Alex pushed his limbs into the tight tubes and tried to catch up.

"Don't rush it," Carl reminded him. "That only makes it harder."

A space walk on day six was surely rushing it.

When all four of them were in their complete underlayers, they carefully opened the seals that made their three-piece space suits into one body. Now each suit was a boot-pant piece, a torso-to-glove piece, and a helmet. "Remember," Carl said. "The suit stays put, and you move into it. Legs first."

Alex pulled himself up along the ridged wall until he was just above his target, the open waist of his pants. He slid his legs inside, and the pants crunched down with his knees. Carl had to come pull them up for him. But when it was time to put on his top half, Alex had no trouble at all. Malik struggled with his seals, and Irma got her gloves twisted, but Alex slid into his floating empty astronaut body with ease.

He was nine-tenths astronaut now. The last tenth required opening the hatch.



What was Alex doing up here, if he was not a real astronaut? For the last twenty years, Alex Welch-Peters had been manipulating algae in hopes of creating a new species that captured more carbon dioxide than naturally occurring species did, resulting-if he cracked it-in less CO2 and more oxygen in the atmosphere: a slowing of global warming. Scaled up, it might begin to reverse the damage of his own species. It was not a question of whether it could be done, because Alex had done it-once, a little less than a year ago. Tray 182. Alex believed with all his brain that he could replicate that result here, and he believed with all his heart that he must, but that was a little different.

Alex had been offered three years of support and a completely controlled environment to create a means for carbon capture on this private space station. The owners of Parallaxis I wanted frontier scientists, unconstrained by the pressures of home, to show off to their billionaire clientele, and those billionaires would need air to breathe. Alex had been a lousy husband and father for the last several years while he tried and failed to save the world, and he had lost his marriage because of it. The offer had come at the right time. If he succeeded here, his children could carry with them the knowledge that their father's absence had not been in vain. That his work was for them, and that it had been worth it.



Except for his helmet, which, tethered to his neckline, floated at his shoulders like a second head, Alex was fully suited now. While Carl slipped easily into his own suit, Alex, Malik, and Irma looked one another over, experimenting with their new exoskeletons. It was helpful to think of the space suit that way: not a costume but a'protect've shell, evolved ideally for his survival.

"Nervous?" Irma asked him. Her dark cloud of curls floated around her face like cotton candy. She tried to look sympathetic, but her cheeks looked ready to pop.

"A bit," said Alex.

"Ginger chew?"

He nodded and, with some difficulty, took the little lump from her outstretched glove, where it slipped right through his fingers and he had to catch it in the air like a fat, slow fly. In his mouth the ginger chew was squishy, spicy, and familiar. Meg had gone through a dozen a day when she was pregnant with Shane. He didn't think he'd had one since.

"Finish up quick," said Carl.

Alex imagined suits for his family hitched to the wall-for Meg, for Mary Agnes, and a tiny one for Shane. His was the one that punctured the fantasy. No one was making space suits for six-year-olds.

Alex was one of eight newcomers to Parallaxis: three research scientists, including himself, a robotics engineer, two doctors, a 3D fabricator, and Carl the Astronaut. Irma Garcia, one of the other research scientists, called herself a space gardener. She would grow food so that they would not have to live on reconstituted mushes and go-gels alone. The other was Malik Cobb, who had created Parallaxis's water supply by designing mechanisms by which ice was mined from the atmosphere's noctilucent clouds. Alex did not exactly understand it. What he understood was that Irma and Malik were brilliant and proven. They knew that they belonged here.

Carl knocked on the inside of the doorframe for good luck and led them out of the suit room and up to the airlock. Alex's ginger chew was gone, but the spice was still hot in his throat, a little too much like fear.

"Hey, you all right?" Malik floated up next to him.

Alex swallowed. "I am all right, yes, but also, I think some nervousness is a pretty rational, warranted response to an unexpected space walk?"

"Yeah, for sure," said Malik. "But you look-"

"I'm fine," said Alex.

"We all had training, the exact same training," he said. "It's the same motions, just different scenery."

Alex turned to see if Malik really believed this.

Malik coughed. "What I'm saying is, since you're no better or worse prepared than I am, all this sweat on your face is stressing me out."

"The suit is hot," Alex said.

"The suit is hot," said Malik. "We'll go with that."



Parallaxis I, 220 miles from Earth, was shaped like a ring, or a tire. In a few months, it would begin to rotate around a central axis, as a wheel does. Like a Tilt-A-Whirl, this spinning would draw everything and everyone floating in the ring outward until they were flat against the outermost wall. Not stuck, though-once they had their strength back, they would be able to stand, walk, set down a cup of coffee and have it stay put. They would be able to walk all the way around the ring and end up right back where they started. Parallaxis I was a big station by historical standards and small by fantasy ones: to walk a lap would be like walking around four city blocks in Chicago or Melbourne or the perimeter of four Wrigley Fields that shared the same home plate. There would be a gracious central promenade with ambient lighting that changed to evoke the hour of the day, and dozens of precisely designed pods-labs, homes, closed storage, staff areas, and exquisite recreational spaces-on either side of it, a few entered by intimate corridors that would function like private driveways. These would be for the billionaires who would start moving in later this year, once Alex and his colleagues had built all of this.

For now, the ring was mostly empty, except for the simulated Sky and the slapdash barracks that housed Alex and his colleagues: four walls zip-tied together and seven cots mounted upon them, with seven fleece sleeping bags and stretchy straps to keep them tucked in. Not comfortable by any stretch, but they would rather sleep together in their barracks than in the Helper station, which was tiny, old, and smelly. Docked to the inside of the ring, the Helper was a kind of baby'station inhabited for the last eight years by the rotating cast of astronauts and former marines who had built Parallaxis I. The only remaining inhabitant of the Helper was Josef Mozgov, their captain. He had been up for all eight years.

Alex hadn't seen Mozgov since their first day. When their shuttle had docked to the Helper, it had been Mozgov who opened the airlock for the seven frightened newcomers, all gray-faced with nausea.

"Welcome," he'd said.

His remaining crew, two exhausted astronauts trying to make it just one more day before they were sent back home to Earth, had released them from their confinement in the shuttle. The newcomers had been instructed to hold hands, and in this fashion they were pulled slowly through the airlock into the packed and grimy Helper, through the second airlock, and finally into the cavernous donut that was Parallaxis I. The crew had let go of their charges' hands and tried to demonstrate that it was safe to move around. They'd waved their arms and shaken their hair, which floated off their heads in greasy ropes, like seaweed. One had managed enough enthusiasm for a slow flip. They would be gone the next day.

The newcomers floated together like a school of fish. Alex saw no doors, no floor, only the expanse of moonlit night sky that stretched out right in front of them, threatening to pull him out into it.

"The Sky is a screen, just a screen," Mozgov said.

Right. He knew that.

"It will help if you orient yourselves this way," Mozgov said. He rotated himself ninety degrees so that the night sky was overhead, and raised his index finger. "That's 'up.'"

The floating huddle broke up. Alex wiggled around to get the Sky overhead, where he didn't have to look right at it. Its depth and darkness looked too real. How could you face the deep night sky without your feet on any ground?

"They could have set it to morning," Malik whispered to him. "Might have been more welcoming."

Mozgov and his crew unfurled a long cord and had the newcomers hold on to it in a line, like preschoolers on a field trip, and led them around the ring on a tour of their new home. Alex was in the middle of the pack, behind Macy Slivens, the doctor, who twitched her head from side to side like a watchful bird, and Malik, whose quiet sighs were unsettling at best.

The station was not nearly as complete as they had been told. To Alex, it appeared that just enough had been done so that they wouldn't need their space suits inside, and nothing more. Certainly no luxury apartments or viewing lounges. He hoped they'd double-checked all the joints so that no one would be sucked out through a hole if a piece of wall fell off. The heating and electrical systems were working, but that was about it.

Mozgov pulled open a panel to reveal the mechanicals running beneath the ground, or what would be "beneath" and "the ground," someday. He showed them the lots for the client homes, not yet built, and their own lab pods and home pods: all blank space.

"Raw possibility," said Irma, her voice light, almost bouncing. She was first among them to master the backflip.



"Line up," Carl told them now. "Tether together."

He and Irma would be first and last, and they would clip to the exterior of the station. They would be the ones refreshing the batteries, with Malik and Alex between them in supporting roles. Mozgov would supervise from Control in the Helper. "The people before us did this repair without a hitch," Carl said. He said nearly everything as though he'd told them already and didn't trust them to remember, which Alex appreciated, though he could tell Malik did not. "We expect no problems."

They entered the airlock, and the door to the station slid shut. "Ready?"

Helmets, down. Seals checked, double-checked, triple-checked. One, two, three, four human beings, clipped into formation, ready to face the dark unknown.

"Ready?" Carl asked.

"Cobb ready."

"Garcia ready."

"Welch-Peters ready."

"All ready," said Carl.

The hatch slid open, and outside, there was nothing.



The edgeless darkness, the thinness of it-it didn't matter that Alex had already seen it through glass. The darkness filled his eyes first and drew the breath right out of him. And then, looming behind him was Earth, huge and round and real. White streaks wrapped the blue and green marble like cotton,'protect'ng it. The sight was hard to reconcile with the ground he lived on-had lived on, until a week ago. In his country alone, California was on fire nine months a year, half of Texas was flooded with mud, and the hurricanes that turned coastal towns into mulch no longer kept to any calendar, but from up here, you would think the whole planet lived in verdant spring bloom.

Then he noticed the silence, one he had never heard before. At home silence meant that he had erected a thick barrier between his brain and the ceaseless noise around it. This silence was the opposite: empty. He could not hear the bodies moving next to his. He watched Carl pulling himself along the gray exterior of the station, hand over hand toward the solar panels, and his mind expected bumps, crunches, and squeaks, but he didn't hear anything at all.

Editorial Reviews

12/20/2021

Thriller author Scherm (Unbecoming) pivots to literary science fiction in this polished but hollow big data parable centered on exposure, privacy, and lies in a near-future Earth plagued by climate disaster and frequent pandemics where smartphones are directly wired into people’s brains and data privacy is only for the rich. Michigan scientist Alex Welch-Peters’s life’s work—bioengineering carbon-capturing algae to slow global warming—succeeded only once. Now he’s on contract to replicate the discovery on the unfinished private luxury space station Parallaxis, a haven-to-be for 10 billionaires 220 miles above Earth. Meanwhile, socially inept researcher Tess is hired to train a behavior-prediction algorithm—with the Parallaxis team as test subjects. As the algorithm becomes increasingly coercive and drags in all those aboard Parallaxis, the researchers and their families get caught in a web of conflict and lies. Scherm’s crisp prose smooths over complex interpersonal machinations and tends to overexplain its own allegories, leaving character motivations and themes feeling obvious. The broad range of issues, meanwhile, all get the same scant treatment; rape culture, for example, becomes mere window dressing. Fans of Emily St. John Mandel or Liz Harmer will appreciate Scherm’s burning world, but miss the emotional intelligence. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2022-01-26
Near-future Earth is in deep trouble. The humanity-saving space station isn’t looking so good either.

Scherm’s second novel, after Unbecoming (2015), is a high-concept domestic novel that merges science fiction and eco-fiction tropes while braiding a host of characters and subplots. The main one involves Alex, a beleaguered scientist who has long been hoping to create a species of algae that can consume enough carbon dioxide to stem global warming. That crisis is racing out of control by 2033, when the novel is largely set, from constant wildfires to Midwestern heat waves that kill tens of thousands at a time. Alex has been recruited by Sensus, a Google/Apple–ish megacorp, to do his research on Parallaxis I, a space station orbiting Earth that’s designed partly for research, partly as an escape hatch for billionaires looking to get away from the chaos down below. Alex’s thoughts are earthbound, though: He’s recently separated from his wife, and his teenage daughter, Mary Agnes, is suffering rounds of cyberbullying and deepfake revenge porn facilitated by Sensus products. Added into this drama are Tess, a researcher hired to perfect an algorithm monitoring the behavior of Alex and Parallaxis’ other occupants, and the two sisters who run Sensus, often in a contentious relationship. And more: other scientists, family members, and billionaire occupants grumpy over delays and cost overruns. It’s all a lot—too much, really, for a novel that works the familiar theme that a change of scenery won’t erase our flaws. But credit Scherm for striving to give the climate change novel a wider yet still realistic scope and for creating some nuanced characters in Alex and Mary Agnes, who are both eager to do the right thing but undone by humanity, its fickle nature, and its allegedly liberating but often self-imprisoning technologies.

An ambitious, sometimes cumbersome dystopian tale.

Kirkus Reviews

Compulsively readable. . . . A House Between the Earth and the Moon is a thought-provoking and absorbing read. By deftly combining the subjects of big tech and climate change, Scherm has created a world that fully embodies the anxiety and indignity of our times.”
—Sandra Newman, The New York Times Book Review

“Riveting. . . . Rebecca Scherm’s A House Between Earth and the Moon grapples with a gaggle of red-hot current issues: income inequality, surveillance, capitalist overreach, AI, cyberbullying, gun control. She packs them all into the powerful rocket engine of climate disaster—the biggest, baddest issue of all—and launches the whole shebang into space. It’s a rocking ride. The novel is propulsive, captivating, touching, funny—and utterly terrifying.”
—L.A. Taggart, San Francisco Chronicle

“Part ensemble family drama, part coming-of-age story, part social novel, part cli-fi, [A House Between Earth and the Moon is] original and affecting not despite its overstuffed mélange of big ideas but because of how deftly Scherm weaves them together. . . . [The novel] primarily takes place in space, but it succeeds because of how richly Scherm depicts her characters’ interior lives. This is the kind of book that practically begs for a sequel, one that dangles some tantalizingly loose ends. This is a house with more rooms to explore.”
—Kate Knibbs, Wired

“Rebecca Scherm’s A House Between Earth and the Moon returns us to the cautionary mode of futuristic fiction, taking place largely in a billionaire-funded space station called Parallaxis. On Earth, global warming has brought about hurricanes, drought, food shortages, stinkbug infestations and deadly heat waves. A tech juggernaut called Sensus has exploited the insecurity, manufacturing phone chips that are implanted beneath the skin and can, of course, capture endless amounts of personal data. Sensus is the mover behind Parallaxis, into which they have sent a team of scientists who are tasked with both constructing living quarters and perfecting their research innovations to provide food, water and clean air. . . . I like the point that luxury space residences, portrayed in films in spotless modular fashion, will more likely be depressing and unhygienic cubes.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“This book had me sleepless and wild-eyed, obsessing over how I would live if I, like the characters in Scherm’s novel, lived on a climate change-ravaged earth, watching billionaires flee to their own private oasis in outer space. . . . Scherm’s book will embed in your brain like a futuristic smartphone, in part because she wisely sets it just a couple of years in the future. Her characters may have technology we don’t, but they share our collective sense of denial about the ramifications of climate devastation, and they share our hope.” 
—Jenny Singer, Glamour

“Rebecca Scherm is a novelist gifted with both a visionary sense of invention and an unrelenting attention to fine-grained details. . . . Compellingly plotted and thoughtfully made, her novel speaks to what constrains each of us, as inhabitants and inheritors of this fraught world, as parents and caretakers, as people caught between good intentions and bad options. How we might move beyond those limits is the essential question at the heart of this eerie, deeply affecting book.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“This dystopian novel will carry you far away, no matter where you are.”
—Good Housekeeping’s “20 New Books to Add to Your Summer 2022 Reading List”

“Part sci-fi, part dreamy drama, The House Between Earth and the Moon follows the residents of Parallaxis (a luxury space station developed by tech giant Sensus) as they try to build a home for billionaires to escape Earth's increasing inhospitality. Meanwhile, the people they leave back home—particularly the family of Alex, a researcher seeking to create a carbon-guzzling algae—are struggling with both their present and futures.”
—Marie Claire, “The Most Eagerly Anticipated Fiction by Women in 2022”

“[A House Between Earth and the Moon] repeatedly engages with competing ideas about the most effective way to make the world a better place. . . . Scherm’s characters seem unsatisfied with the ways they themselves answer such questions, an interpretive ambiguity that is one of the book’s strengths. . . . A House Between Earth and the Moon does not offer prescriptive answers to the various problems it identifies, leaving the reader room to consider their own views. In doing so, the reader may learn something about themselves. In the end, what more can one ask of a book?”
—Eric P.S. Baumer, Science Magazine

“A surprisingly timely work of science fiction, Rebecca Scherm’s A House Between Earth and the Moon follows Alex, a climate scientist, as he leaves the burning Earth behind for Parallaxis — a luxury space station owned by a tech titan, which has agreed to bankroll his latest research. Moving between Alex, his teen daughter living back on Earth, and the psychologist tasked with observing Alex and the other Parallaxis Pioneers, Scherm’s novel explores humanity’s fraught relationship with technology and innovation.”
—Bustle, “The Most Anticipated Books of March 2022”

“Inventive and thrilling, A House Between Earth and the Moon dives into the near-future climate apocalypse with eerie prescience, startling humor, and, somehow, hope. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half

"Rebecca Scherm is a treasure of a novelist: searching, inventive, her scope both everyday and expansive, her work marked by a tender but merciless psychological acuity. In A House Between Earth and the Moon, she has the near future—or the present—of perpetual emergency firmly within her grasp. It’s a thrill to read this novel, which punctures, urgently and humanely, the technocrat fantasy that space might save us; it brilliantly vivifies the terrors of love and surveillance and ambition, the dream and impossibility of escape."
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror

“If A House Between Earth and the Moon wants us to ask what makes a house into a home, it wants us to know that family is the answer. . . . What A House Between Earth and the Moon suggests is that there is no solution but some kind of strange mix of hope and resignation, a wry kind of wonder.”
—Bekah Waakles, Ploughshares

“A House Between Earth and the Moon is a compelling, urgent book. I couldn't put it down. Rebecca Scherm brilliantly, and with such heart and tenderness, imagines a frightening future for our planet and our flawed, complicated species, and the worlds she imagines are so vivid, and feel so real I wondered if she owns a crystal ball. I loved these characters and their struggles and desires, and I rooted for them, and worried about them, and I can’t stop thinking about them. This is a remarkable novel.”
—Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of California

“If you read just one novel about future billionaires funding scientists to try to save a select few from global warming by making it possible to live in outer space, definitely let it be A House Between Earth and the Moon.”
—Glamour, “The Best Books of 2022 to Add to Your Reading List”

“I loved A House Between Earth and the Moon—a smart, propulsive, sharply observed psychological novel set in a convincingly detailed near future, as well as an insightful examination of how rapid advances in communication technology can inadvertently render us indecipherable to each other.”
—Dexter Palmer, author of Version Control

“Addictive. . . . Fast-paced. . . . Scherm's character-driven sf story centers on individuals working against the clock to find a solution to climate change. . . . Scherm beautifully captures emotion in her writing as she shows how important connection is to our shared humanity.”
—Booklist

“A high-concept domestic novel that merges science fiction and eco-fiction tropes. . . . Scherm [gives] the climate change novel a wider yet still realistic scope and . . . nuanced characters in Alex and Mary Agnes, who are both eager to do the right thing but undone by humanity, its fickle nature, and its allegedly liberating but often self-imprisoning technologies.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

06/01/2022

Scherm's (Unbecoming) gripping novel is set in a nightmarishly plausible near-future. Just over a decade from now, global warming has made death by natural disaster a constant risk, with evacuation warnings transmitted through Sensus phones, stranding offline extremists to their fate by fire, hurricane, or heat wave. The aural implants provide constant connection at the cost of privacy. As total ecological collapse looms, Sensus founders Katherine and Rachel Son stand to profit from two new endeavors: their space station Paralaxis, a billionaire escape route currently staffed by environmental scientists tasked with creating sustainable luxury habitats; and Views, behind-the-eyes streaming video of the scientists' every action, filmed by their nextgen phones. When Katherine recruits coding genius Tess to train history's most sophisticated predictive algorithm on Views, Tess becomes an invisible, increasingly obsessed witness to unwitting subjects. She sees, then joins, the acceleration toward confrontation aboard Paralaxis and a new global paradigm. Xe Sands skillfully commands pace and pathos for a cinematic listening experience, slipping between voices as distinct and believable as the tragically flawed characters Scherm has created. VERDICT Superb speculative fiction anchored by human drama, informed by genuine threats, and compellingly narrated.—Lauren Kage

Library Journal - Audio