"The Voice of the Earth" by Bernard Werber, summary

French writer Bernard Werber’s science fiction novel tells the story of the anthropomorphic living planet Gaia, which seeks a cosmic marriage with sentient asteroids, while the humans it created and the microhumans it created wage a brutal struggle for survival. The novel was written and published in 2014 in Paris by Albin Michel. It concludes the science fiction trilogy "The Third Humanity," which also includes "The Third Humanity" (2012, Part I) and "Microhumans" (2013, Part II).

The Approach of Teia and the Escape from the Azores

Planet Earth feels like a forty-five-year-old living being by human standards. It intercepts radio waves from crustal parasites and discovers that a sentient, Y-shaped, twenty-eight-kilometer-long asteroid, Theia-13, is approaching from the depths of space. For the planet, it is a desirable partner, bearing the male seed of sulfur-based life. Humanity sees the cosmic body as a threat to usher in a sixth mass extinction.

UN Secretary-General Stanislas Drouin convenes an emergency assembly. A young nation of microhumans, Homo metamorphosis, led by Queen Emma-109, assumes their protection. Their 10,000-strong population lives on the island of Flores in the Azores archipelago. Meanwhile, biologist David Wells is struggling with a breakup with his wife, Aurora Kammerer-Wells, who has taken their three children. Along with Colonel Natalia Ovitz, pilot Martin Janicaud, and three university competition winners, David flies a giant seaplane, the Albatross, to Micropolis to deliver a French radio telescope to the dwarf civilization.

Gaia attempts to neutralize the microhumans threatening to destroy her space guest by triggering an underwater earthquake. A tsunami hits Flores. All one hundred thousand microhumans hastily load into the seaplane’s cargo hold, stacking in layers like a hive. David fixes a malfunction in the launch pad at the last moment, allowing the Lymphocyte-13 rocket carrying three female astronauts to lift off seconds before the devastating wave hits.

Disaster in space and on land

A seaplane is damaged by lightning strikes and crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. The passengers find refuge on a floating garbage island made of plastic bags, where they use flaming torches to fend off hordes of aggressive crabs. The crowd then navigates the scorching desert through their unity and their habit of burrowing into the cold sand, like roadrunners. The exhausted fugitives are picked up by the French aircraft carrier Georges Brassens.

In space, a rocket crew under the command of Emma-321 drills into the surface of an asteroid and falls into a cavity. The astronauts discover a cave filled with crystals, an underground lake, six-winged birds, and three-eyed yellow animals. The shocked captain refuses to detonate the atomic bomb. Earth demands the immediate elimination of the threat. Hand-to-hand combat breaks out between the microwomen. Emma-321 kills Emma-567 with a screwdriver and is then killed by Emma-568’s jackhammer. The surviving Emma-568 restarts the timer too late, saving her own life.

Theia-14 enters Earth’s atmosphere and explodes too late. A fiery hail of debris obliterates Jakarta and bombards Hong Kong, Calcutta, Hanoi, and southern China, killing three billion people. At a UN session in New York, an Indonesian fanatic plunges a ritual kriss into the abdomen of Queen Emma-109. Professor David Wells secretly steals her body from the morgue and delivers it to Dr. Saldman’s clinic. Surgeons transplant an artificial heart into the queen and restore her organs.

Conversations with the Planet and the Height of War

David is suspended from teaching at the Sorbonne. Archaeologist Hypatia Kim convinces him to travel to Egypt to establish contact with Gaia before the Great Pyramid of Giza is demolished. Beneath the pyramid, scientists detonate a hidden stone slab and discover the gigantic skeleton of an Atlantean woman, along with a circular pool of oil. Submerged in the black, oily liquid, David hears the voice of Earth. The planet tells of its birth from cosmic dust, of the impact of ancient Theia 1, which tore off a chunk of its crust to form the Moon, and of a agonizing headache due to the failed contact with Theia 13.

The bomb squad’s explosions seal off the exit. Obeying a mental command from the planet, David and Hypatia dive to the bottom of the oil well, and the current ejects them through a desert oil well. Protests by hunger strikers, students, and feminists from the Femen movement rage in Cairo. David shouts the slogan "Vivat Evolution!" into the crowd, which is taken up by thousands of protesters storming police bulldozers. Natalia Ovits and Martin Janicot, riding a heavy tractor, rescue the researchers from the police station.

Chinese President Chang and Iranian President Jaffar unleash World War III to radically reduce the country’s surplus population. The opponents are the Yin Alliance (China, Iran, Pakistan, and Latin American countries) and the Yang Bloc (India, Russia, the United States, and European countries). Field battles in the snowy Ladakh escalate into an offensive by a Chinese army numbering forty million soldiers. The micropolis, rebuilt on the high plateau of Flores, declares strict neutrality and supplies weapons to both sides. An Iranian civilian plane secretly drops a nuclear device in a suitcase on the flourishing capital. A million dwarfs are incinerated in seconds, and the seriously wounded Emma-109 dies in the infirmary in David’s arms.

Injections for Gaia and saving the orbit

David and Hypatia are hiding from the war on the remote Pacific island of Easter Island. A Korean woman compares a map of volcanoes with the chakras and meridians of the planetary body. Using a construction crane, scientists extract an eighteen-meter-tall stone moai statue from the quarry of the Rano Raraku volcano and insert it into the ground at Terevaka Heights, like an acupuncture needle into the Earth’s third eye. In a crater lake, they submerge themselves in oil and listen to Gaia’s new demand: the approaching asteroid Theia-14 must pierce the Earth’s crust unimpeded, otherwise the planet will spew forth all the lava from its volcanic depths.

The new ruler of the Micromen, Popess Emma-666, commands the Lunapolis base, built under a transparent dome shaped like a human head. To repel the Earth army’s assault, she deploys the EmChaps — a new subterranean subspecies of Homo subterraneus, bred by crossing humans with naked desert mole rats. The clawed, blind dwarfs instantly dig tunnels and drag the landing forces’ heavy rockets underground. In retaliation for the destruction of Micropolis, lunar catapults launch three asteroids, wiping out Beijing, Tehran, and Caracas. Four billion Earthlings then vote online to pardon Lunapolis in exchange for intercepting the giant Theia-14 hurtling toward Earth.

David and Hypatia arrive on the Moon. David suggests not destroying the 135-kilometer-diameter asteroid and crashing it onto the planet. The pilots of the Catapult-14 rocket attach the space rock with tethers, slowing it down and placing it into a stable near-Earth orbit. The asteroid, with its own blue biosphere, becomes Earth’s second satellite. Humanity escapes destruction, and Gaia gains the 24-hour proximity of her desired partner.

Alone at the habitation module’s panoramic window overlooking the glowing Earth, David refuses an empathy pill and, without any chemicals, achieves a complete understanding with Hypatia. For the first time in many years, they embrace. The nascent union of the planet and its new satellite silently pulses in near-Earth orbit.