A Fragile Orbit: Technology, Surveillance, and the Human Condition in Rebecca Scherm’s "A House Between Earth and the Moon"

🔖“Speculation demands ambition—the ability not only to sketch out the depths of human depravity, but also to pine for its redemption.”🔖

📑 Synopsis :

Scientist Alex Welch-Peters has believed for twenty years that his super-algae can reverse the effects of climate change. His obsession with his research has jeopardised his marriage, his relationships with his kids, and his own professional future. When Sensus, the colossal tech company, offers 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 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. Meanwhile, back on Earth, with much of the country ablaze in wildfires, Alex’s family tries to remain safe in Michigan. His 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. As they toil away two hundred miles in the sky, Sensus is designing an algorithm that will predict human behaviour. Tess, a young social psychologist Sensus has hired to watch the Pioneers through their phones, begins to develop an intimate, obsessive relationship with her subjects. When she takes it a step further—travelling to Parallaxis to observe them up close—the controlled experiment begins to unravel.

📝 Review : 

Rebecca Scherm's 'A House Between Earth and the Moon' is a bold and incisive novel of speculative fiction that ventures beyond the confines of conventional climate fiction to examine the ethical, psychological, and technological conundrums of the next few decades. 

Set largely in 2033—a time when the world is smothered by wildfires, environmental ruin, and pervasive monitoring—the book takes place on board Parallaxis I, a private space station constructed by a dominant technology company named Sensus.

 

By a rich interplay of human and systemic characters, Scherm weaves a story that is both thrillingly futuristic and eerily timely, exploring how ambition, guilt, and the desire for control distort human connections when human society itself appears to be coming apart.

📹 Humanity in the Age of Surveillance

In the heart of the novel is an elaborate moral exploration of surveillance and privacy. Scherm's hypothetical future is one where privacy is not a right but a luxury commodity, divided and sold by corporate concerns. 

The Supreme Court in this dystopia has made privacy a commodity to be bought, available to the rich alone, who can climb the stratified levels of "privatisation",—at the highest level of which is invisibility itself. This commodification of human intimacy is performed through the character of Tess, a social psychologist hired by Sensus, whose job is to observe the residents of Parallaxis in the name of predictive research. Tess's "Views" program enables her not just to observe but to enter the emotional lives of the people she is observing, an invasion both metaphorical and literal of human interiority. What starts out as scientific interest metastasises into fixation, showing how technology, having been engineered to grasp humanity, can so readily undermine it.

Scherm positions Tess in a tradition of literary surveillance characters—reversing Winston Smith's stare, recalling the corruption of 1984 from the observer's point of view. But as opposed to Orwell's sterile political monolith, Sensus is driven by the moral rhetoric of improvement and optimisation. In this, Scherm's criticism is psychologically more nuanced: the surveillance machinery is seductive because it cloaks itself in benevolence. The arc of Tess's journey dramatises the tragedy of technological complicity—her reliance on data as a means of empathy ultimately kills the very empathy she tried to measure.

🌎 Climate Fiction and the Ethics of Escape

The environmental crisis in 'A House Between Earth and the Moon' comprises both the setting and the emotional centre of the story. Earth's environmental degradation—exhibited by heat domes, blazes, and toxic air—makes the planet ever more hostile and drives the super-rich to invest in Sensus's space-based sanctuary. 

The lead character, scientist Alex Welch-Peters, enters the Parallaxis experiment with a last-chance optimism: his scientific investigation into super-algae, which can clean up the oceans, can redeem years of neglect as a family member and help undo planetary damage. But in Scherm's version, idealism in science is always accompanied by corporate greed. Alex's own moral integrity becomes entangled in the same system he imagines himself going beyond. 

The physical distance between Earth and the space station is turned into an allegory of humanity's moral and emotional distance from the planet itself. Scherm's world, therefore, embodies the essential paradox of technological salvation: the same technology that could rescue humanity at the same time strips it of its imperfections, deflecting responsibility instead of facing it. 

The Pioneers on Parallaxis perceive themselves as humanity's pioneers, but their endeavour is an expression of the arrogance of empire—that utopia can be built through self-selective exclusion. In this kind of world, the project of getting off Earth becomes a moral failure in the guise of progress, a story that closely echoes issues around billionaire space exploration and ecocapitalism today.

🧠 Character and Psychological Realism

Beneath its speculative underpinnings, the strength of the novel resides in its psychological richness. Scherm sidesteps the detachment characteristic of hard sci-fi through situating her characters in acute emotional verisimilitude. 

Alex, both propelled by scientific aim and drained by shame, is a figure of the modern technocrat tortured by ethical concern. His adolescent daughter, Mary Agnes, matures within a climate-wrecked America, bound to technology both as lifeline and confinement. Through her, Scherm humanises the generational trauma of ecological despair—a child literally raised in the ruins of her parents' ambition.

Tess, on the other hand, serves as both participant and observer of the drama of alienation. Her transformation—from objective data scientist to voyeuristic puppeteer—reifies the psychological decay caused by absolute power and limitless access. 

The Son sisters, Katherine and Rachel, perform another axis of duality: corporate omnipotence and performative ethics. Katherine's offscreen dominance recalls a mythic, near-divine authority, and Rachel's front-of-house charm conceals moral compromise. These character dualities reinforce Scherm's fascination with duplicity—tension between appearance and affect, forward and backwards, visibility and invisibility.

🔘 Structure and Multiplicity

'A House Between Earth and the Moon' structurally uses a cast rotation form, alternating Earth and outer space, closeness and distance.

This narrative technique approximates the orbital dynamics of its world—each voice is a satellite that orbits a central ethical mass. The shifts create moments of dissonance but also resonance because the reader is constantly reminded that no single voice is enough to contain the entirety of the crisis. However, Scherm's approach is uniquely moral: her multiplicity is not merely an aesthetic decision but a philosophical one, implying that only with multiplicity can humankind hope to understand its complicity with technology.

Even so, this format creates a narratiimbalancence. The plot’s three major strands—Alex’s scientific mission, Tess’s surveillance experiment, and Mary Agnes’s coming-of-age—occasionally read as separate novellas tenuously bound by theme. The novel’s ambition, in this regard, can be both its virtue and its liability: by attempting to encompass the totality of socio-technological modernity, it risks sacrificing immediacy for scope. But it is this excess itself—its inability to fold the complexity of life into one, containable narrative—that renders the novel intellectually significant.

🌌 The Poetics of Space

Scherm's prose, though not at all lyrical, comes very close to a soft precision that replicates the sterile elegance of space itself. 

The Parallaxis station is presented as a contradictory location: claustrophobic and endless, a cage wrapped in the guise of freedom. The repeated invocation of walls, hatches, ventilation ducts, and naked wiring highlights the materiality of technological aspiration—the architecture of escape. 

Earth is represented by sensory excess: heat, noise, flame, rot. The two geographies act not only as scenery but as metaphysical states, exteriorising the split human psyche—half dreaming of transcendence, half grieving the ground abandoned.

In the climactic moments of the novel, as Parallaxis swings wildly between operational laboratory and mental asylum, Scherm's prose reflects this breakdown of coherence. The language is fractured, recursive, and sometimes disorienting, as if the narrative itself were falling victim to the vertigo of omniscience. Rather than a stylistic flaw, this effect stages the novel's underlying tension between control and entropy, artifice and feeling.

👩‍💻 Technology, Power, and the Human Algorithm

At its most abstract, A House Between Earth and the Moon is an exploration of algorithmic determinism—the idea that human action can be charted, forecast, and even substituted by machines. 

Scherm's fictional Sensus corporation is simultaneously metaphor and foretelling, the pinnacle of Big Tech's encroachment on human consciousness. The "Views" program, by which Tess can experience others' lives vicariously, is a chilling extrapolation of social media surveillance logic: empathy turned into omnipresence.

Scherm's representation of technology is neither pedagogic nor apocalyptic. In contrast to the flashy dystopias of cyberpunk, her depiction is eerily realistic—the interfaces are low-key, the intrusions courteous. It is not what technology does, however, that is horrifying, but how voluntarily human beings acquiesce in its mastery. The Pioneers on Parallaxis sacrifice their privacy for progress, just as the citizens on Earth give up autonomy for security.

💼 Gender, Corporatism, and the Body

One of the novel's quietly impressive accomplishments is its feminist undertone. Using Katherine and Rachel Son, Scherm explores the gendered contours of corporate power. 

Katherine's invisibility—her need for anonymity and control—is set against Rachel's performative femininity, needed to make the corporation human. This opposition is a wider commentary upon how women in power are asked to embody opposing ideals: maternal goodness and cold efficiency, beauty and unreadability.

Tess’s own body becomes another site of conflict; her obsessive immersion in the inner lives of others mirrors how female labour—emotional, intellectual, and affective—is continually exploited in the service of institutions that deny its humanity.

Even the outline of the space station itself, "a house between worlds," assumes metaphorical significance as a feminized body—built, contained, and probed by technological apparatuses. Scherm's cosmic architecture is a gendered microcosm of earthly exploitation, in which control disguises itself as protection and care devolves into confinement.

⁉️ The Failure of Utopia

In the end, 'A House Between Earth and the Moon' is an account of utopia's failure. The Parallaxis experiment starts out as a fantasy of perfection—scientific, ethical, and existential—but inevitably falls into distrust and rot. Scherm's philosophical point is that utopias collapse not through poor design but through the necessity of denying vulnerability. The instant a system promises to foretell all human behaviour, it destroys the spontaneity that gives humanity significance. The predictive algorithms intended to protect paradise become its nemesis.

The close ambiguities of the novel—unresolved plotlines, fractured emotional states left hanging—mirror this unwillingness to close. Scherm resists the epistemological closure that is typical of science fiction; there is no triumphant discovery, no ultimate redemption. The "house between Earth and the Moon" hangs suspended, both literally and ethically, between destruction and rebirth.

Scherm's novel has been met with both approbation and frustration by critics. These varied responses are helpful: they reflect the novel's own thematic incoherence, which vacillates between order and disorder, reason and emotion. This refusal to be liked is not a weakness, but an indication of the novel's density. It is not a novel that tries to please—it tries to provoke, to engage the reader in its experiment in morality.

🤖 The Moral Gravity of the Future

In 'A House Between Earth and the Moon', Rebecca Scherm builds not just a speculative fiction but a moral framework for the 21st century's fears. Through its orbiting narratives and ambivalent characters, the novel reveals the fault lines of a progress-obsessed civilization that cannot behold itself. Its synthesis of climate crisis, technological monitoring, and interpersonal dissolution creates a vision of the future that seems chillingly real.

What sets Scherm's work apart is the refusal to sentimentalise science or resistance. Her imagination is that of hard-won clarity: those technologies that claim to rescue us reflect our own moral dodges, and the human spirit, bound between guilt and hope, continues in tentative defiance. The titular "house" is therefore a metaphor for the human condition itself—built between agents of annihilation and transcendence, hovering in the void of its own creation. At the end of the novel, what persists is not certitude but consciousness: a knowledge that life, planetary or individual, hangs on not mastery or flight but the willingness to stay responsible in orbit's precarious dance.

Written By : Sabani Das

👥 Audience: 16+

⚠️ Trigger Warnings : 

• Sexual assault / non-consensual sexual content

• Bullying / cyber-bullying 

• Invasive technology / surveillance / loss of privacy

• Climate disaster / environmental catastrophe

• Strong language