Earthside by Dennis E. Taylor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The fate of mankind is in the hands of a group of 20-something science nerds in the sequel to Outland, by the Audible number-one best-selling author of the Bobiverse series.

The Yellowstone super-eruption has put an end to modern civilization. As cities and countries continue to fall, the colony of Rivendell in the alternate Earth known as Outland looks more and more like the only real hope for humanity. But life in Rivendell isn’t getting any simpler, either. Bill and Kevin continue to discover new worlds; the population continues to rise; winter is approaching; and everyone has their own opinion about how things should be run.

Then, a garbled plea for help from Omaha sends most of the security forces back Earthside to investigate, leaving Monica’s police force understaffed just as a large group of refugees arrive with its own ideas and power structure. With threats from both inside and outside, will the colony even survive until spring?

Beyond the Gate: Earthside Delivers a Grittier, Messier Apocalypse

The following ratings are out of 5:
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍
Character development: 🤓😟🤯😎
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Solo Narration

If Outland was the adrenaline-fueled setup (nerds accidentally punch a hole into a parallel Earth, Yellowstone blows, civilization collapses, chaos ensues) then Earthside is the morning after. The party is over. Now comes the hard, unglamorous, deeply human business of trying to build something from the rubble.

The World After the Fire

Taylor doesn’t soften the apocalypse. Two months on from the Yellowstone super-eruption, the northern hemisphere is buried under ash and moving into a killing winter. Crop failures, population collapse, governments going dark. The interludes updating the listener on the wider world outside Rivendell are some of the book’s most quietly devastating moments. There’s a grim satisfaction in how Taylor treats the science here. This isn’t Hollywood volcano drama; it’s a slow, grinding extinction of normalcy, rendered with the same nerdy rigor that made the Bobiverse books so addictive.

Meanwhile, Rivendell (still the most charmingly Lord of the Rings-adjacent colony name in apocalyptic fiction) has clean air, clean water, and enough to eat. By post-Yellowstone standards, they’re living in paradise. But paradise, it turns out, has a HOA, and the HOA is dysfunctional.

The Real Danger Inside the Fence

This is where Earthside earns both its praise and its controversy. The megafauna (Mastodons, dire wolves, giant ground sloths, Smilodons) are still out there beyond the perimeter, still deeply unnerving, still capable of reminding you that Outland’s ecosystem will happily eat you. The Omaha expedition, threading through ash-choked, collapsing ruins in search of critical electronics, delivers some of the book’s most cinematic sequences. And the opening of Dinosaur Earth and Greenhouse Earth as new trans-dimensional frontiers is genuinely tantalizing, a window cracked onto future books.

But the book’s real drama is political. The council faces murder, insurrection, and the question of how to build a government from scratch, and Taylor spends significant time on it. Some readers will find these debates engaging. There’s a genuine intellectual honesty to how the characters wrestle with governance when the old rule book is ash. Others may find it talky. Fair warning: if you came back for more Smilodon stalking sequences, you’ll need patience here.

The Expedition Earthside

The Omaha run turns up elderly survivors, a rifle that’s essentially a personal artillery piece, white-supremacist bunker inhabitants, and all the computer components the colony could ever need. It’s peak Taylor: darkly comic, suspenseful, and laced with the kind of problem-solving ingenuity that feels genuinely satisfying. The six gates, ranging from human-sized to truck-sized, provide an elegant logistical framework for the scavenging missions, and the dwindling pickings in a buried, collapsing Lincoln add real tension to what might otherwise feel like a shopping trip.

The Narrator: Ray Porter

Porter is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator and a fifteen-year veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and it shows. His warm, unhurried delivery is perfectly calibrated for Taylor’s voice: conversational, wry, a little geeky. Many listeners find his voice genuinely relaxing, which sounds like faint praise until you realize how well that quality serves a book juggling existential dread and dry humor simultaneously. He handles the ensemble cast cleanly, giving each character enough distinction to follow in a large and ever-growing colony population. If you loved him as Bob in the Bobiverse, you’ll be right at home. The audiobook runs 8 hours and 55 minutes, a brisk and satisfying length.

What Works, What Doesn’t

Taylor’s greatest strength remains his ability to make scientists the heroes without making heroism feel fake. Bill and Kevin exploring new parallel Earths (the dangerous wonder of Dinosaur Earth, the oppressive lushness of Greenhouse Earth) captures that intoxicating mix of curiosity and mortal terror that makes good science fiction hum. Taylor is the Audible number one best-selling author of the Bobiverse series, and that pedigree shows in his confident plotting and his ear for nerdy banter that never feels forced. I have bought for the first three Bobiverse books but thought I would give this a try first.

The weaknesses are real but forgivable. Some readers note that characters and behaviors feel similar to those in his other books: Bill in particular is practically a Bob clone in a different timeline, which is either charming or repetitive depending on your tolerance. The political sections can drag, and a storyline involving a community member going off their medications has attracted fair criticism for its handling.

The Verdict

Earthside is a second act that knows what it is: a bridge book, expanding the world, deepening the stakes, and setting up confrontations to come. It trades some of the first book’s pulse-pounding momentum for a more grounded, complicated portrait of what civilization actually requires and how fast humans revert to their worst habits when pressure is applied. That’s a worthwhile trade.

If you survived Outland, you owe it to Rivendell to see how the colony weathers its first real winter: Smilodons, politics, bad actors, and all. Ray Porter will make the ride worth it.

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