"The Last Day" by Andrew Hunter Murray
(Dutton, 384 pages, $27.)
Welcome to Earth in 2059. It's not pretty.
Forty years earlier, the planet's rotation began to slow. The climate underwent catastrophic changes, polar ice caps melted and unleashed floods that tore away coastal cities, and as the decades passed and the Slowing came to Stop, whole pieces of the planet were plunged into days of endless sunlight or relentless darkness.
As 2059 dawns, the world has come to grips with Earth's brutal game of musical chairs, one that left Great Britain bathed in sun and the last habitable region. Food sources are slowly re-established, democratic social order has given way to authoritarian rule. Britain's borders are sealed, leaving the rest of the world's inhabitants to die in brutal heat or bitter cold. Those few survivors who somehow make it into the country are shipped to the fields to farm the food for the more fortunate.
Not to be extinguished, America made a self-preserving geopolitical deal during the Slowing and crossed the great ocean, setting up colonies in the southern half of Great Britain, abandoning the New World to rot in its frozen solace. An uneasy truce exists between the Americans and its British landlords.
Ellen Hopper, a marine scientist stationed on a research rig in the frigid Atlantic, has been called back as her Oxford mentor lies on his deathbed. His last whispered words set her on a dangerous assignment in the Dystopian streets of London. What she learns is a shocking secret that could upend Britain's iron grip on the world.
The author, Andrew Hunter Murray, is a British comedian who has taken a dark detour with his first novel. While it's a scientific fact that Earth's rotation is indeed slowing (by milliseconds rather than minutes and hours), Murray has feasted on climatic hyperbole to produce a science-fiction thriller that is as provocative as it is troubling.
_ GINNY GREENE
