What The Hell America!

Metallic Realms
by Lincoln Michel
Atria, 320 pp., $28.99

MICHAEL LINCOLN’S LIFE IS A MESS. He’s a law school dropout in his thirties, his romantic prospects are terrible, he is awash in credit-card debt, and he hasn’t had a paying job in forever. His parents pay the rent on his apartment only to diminish the number of angry, peculiar emails he sends them. He is, in other words, a Loser. But he has one thing going for him: the greatest science-fiction epic of all time, the Star Rot Chronicles, was written in his living room, and he was friends, of a sort, with the people who wrote it. Now, writing in hiding after an undisclosed tragedy, Michael Lincoln will ensure the publication and fame of the Star Rot Chronicles, with ample commentary from himself, the person best suited to analyze it.

Put another way, Lincoln Michel’s second novel, Metallic Realms, is what would happen if Ignatius J. Reilly wrote Pale Fire about an issue of Clarkesworld. It is a delightfully broad satire of many things: pulp sci-fi, literary fiction, writers’ groups, MFA programs, nerds, Brooklyn thirtysomethings, and, most of all, the possibilities and pathologies of fandom culture. It is about the joy and necessity of artistic creation, the self-consuming doubt of struggling writers, the simultaneously symbiotic and parasitic relationship between art and fandom, and the musings of one extremely odd dude. It’s a hoot.

Consider:

The Orb 4 had grand if unrealized plans for The Star Rot Chronicles characters. Not only were there to be “solo novels” spun off by the members, but there would be talk of graphic novels, poetry chapbooks, and at least one TTRPG. Alas. Hypothetical plans were not powerful enough to blast away the meteors of discord that would later crash upon the group. I have firsthand knowledge of these tragic events as the group’s de facto sounding board cum shoulder to cry on. I’ve always been a good listener. I’m deeply introverted, Sagittarius sun and Libra rising, Ravenclaw, Water Tribe citizen, lawful neutral, and an INTP. It might not be an exaggeration to say that I was the glue that held the group together. Yet I couldn’t bond them forever.

Michel’s 2021 full-length debut, The Body Scout, was a delightful mash of biopunk speculative fiction, hardboiled detective work, and baseball. Set in a future where rampant gene editing and cybernetics allow for wild transhumanist body modification for all (so long as they can afford the monthly payments), it followed a scout for baseball teams owned by Big Pharma who worked to recruit promising players and scientists for teams like the Monsanto Mets.

Metallic Realms is thus both more and less audacious: Unlike The Body Scout, which offers a kind of chaotic Snow Crash meets The Island of Doctor Moreau madness, Realms is set firmly in this reality and is suffused with today’s possibilities. Yet the latter book is also much weirder on the formal level: Where The Body Scout played like a Raymond Chandler novel set in a dystopian future, Metallic Realms’s metafictional stylings make clear its indebtedness to Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire, that postmodern literary puzzle.

Michel is not shy about this—he has repeatedly described Metallic Realms as “Pale Fire meets Star Trek”—and delivering on the promise of this conceit is a tall order. Nabokov’s book is in the pantheon of the widely venerated; it is beloved in literary fiction circles even as it has also helped to inspire oddball experimental horror fiction like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Pale Fire is presented as commentary on a 999-line poem written by the commentator’s friend, yet most of the text is in the commentary, not the poem, and most of that commentary is not really about the poem at all.

Metallic Realms has a similar structure. A commentator (Michael Lincoln) reproduces a text (the stories of the Star Rot Chronicles) and surrounds it, in Talmudic fashion, with his analysis, which is often narrative descriptions of the lives of Mike and the authors of the short stories and is much longer than the stories themselves. Both novels feature a wildly unreliable narrator whose obsessive devotion to the source material can easily be read as not only unreasonable but sinister. But Metallic Realms differs from Pale Fire in one key aspect: Whereas Mike’s obsession is with the stories themselves and with at least one of their authors, Pale Fire’s narrator’s obsession is with an entirely different story—the one he wishes the poem were telling.

When Mike’s friend and roommate Taras forms a science fiction writing collective with his girlfriend and a friend from college, Mike is overjoyed and quickly becomes obsessed with their output. (That Mike is not invited to join is a source of some consternation, particularly once another member is added later.) The Orb 4 (as the group is called) sets out to create a science fiction universe in which each of them can write stories featuring the adventures of the ragtag crew of the smuggling ship Star Rot. Mike immediately takes it upon himself to become their lorekeeper, and he devours every discarded draft and obsessively listens in to their writing sessions via a microphone carefully hidden in a fern. It overwhelms him: Nothing in life is more important than the Star Rot Chronicles, not his career, nor his romantic prospects, nor any other sort of personal relationship; he takes it far more seriously than do any of the writers, who enjoy it but are all working on their own separate projects as well.

Mike is thus the apotheosis of a certain kind of science-fiction fan, the sort of person who has opinions about the proper placement of photon torpedo launchers on Star Trek starships, the sort of person responsible for the fact that the Nintendo Wii has a more active Wikipedia page than World War II (in terms of total number of edits). How much more fun would such a person have if they were present at ground zero of the creation of their chosen sci-fi universe? Imagine being close, personal friends with George Lucas while he was making Star Wars while also somehow already being a card-carrying member of the 501st Legion.

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THE STORIES THEMSELVES (with the exception of one vamp on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that I found to be actually quite successful) are deliberately not very good, and the disconnect between their passing amateurish pleasures and the ecstatic praise with which Mike showers them is one of the great recurring jokes of the book:

Captain Baldwin was Taras’s creation—predating the Orb 4 itself, as I’ve mentioned—and Vivian was designed by Darya. . . . Please disabuse yourself of any notion our heroes are Mary Sues or Gary Stus. These characters are as complex and compelling as those in the so-called “Western Canon.” By the end of this volume, I believe you’ll agree that Baldwin has more life than any Ahab and Vivian more fire than a thousand Dalloways.

This is the way Mike always talks, both in the narration of his commentary and, apparently, in his dialogue with other human beings in the real world. Everything is couched in the most dramatic possible language, and everything is always given the highest possible stakes. Here is Mike describing a trip to IKEA that inspired one of the stories: “In the way of most quests, our hero’s journey there was more harrowing than our trek back again. Yet we returned different. Changed. Specifically, we had three shelves, several chairs and stools, and one couch, among a few other ready-to-assemble sundries.” When an anonymous author begins writing erotic fanfiction about the Star Rot characters, Mike describes it as “one of the darkest episodes in Orb 4 history. Days were spent in ugly insinuations and outright slander. The group almost dissolved. The Pax Metallic? Shattered.”

Mike is the source and butt of many of the novel’s jokes, as when he is assailed by the Bushwick Pantser, a serial prankster who has been stalking his neighborhood, or when he diffuses an argument between two of his roommates by sticking a piece of pizza in his mouth, standing on a table, and grotesquely pretending to be Jabba the Hutt. But no one else in the novel’s world escapes mockery. An MFA student is dating a person named “JDaniel—‘The ‘J’ is silent,’” she explained—who played in a lo-fi chill wave noise act called “Wizard Pizzle and the Witch Tits,” in which he plays “the guitar with a screwdriver while intermittently vomiting mouthfuls of glitter on a fan facing the audience in order to shower them with ‘sparkle spells.’” The petty squabbles of the writing group are filled with sharply observed satire that is particularly entertaining when juxtaposed alongside Mike’s grandiose depictions of them. Some of the best jokes are saved for descriptions of Lincoln Michel himself, who appears in a minor scene and is mocked as soundly as everyone else. (The constant jokes at Mike’s expense are also softened somewhat by the fact that his name is so obviously a play on Michel’s own.)

But like any good literary comedy, there is more going on here than just jokes. Metallic Realms deals with the perpetual fight between “literary” fiction and genre fiction, satirizing writers from both camps, yes, but also seriously evaluating the different appeals of these two styles. It’s bad that Mike hid a microphone in the fern to eavesdrop on his friends’ conversations, but is it that much worse than a short-story writer taking an online acquaintance’s posts about donating her kidney and publishing a story that viciously mocks her for it? Why do we bother to try to write in a world that pays writers almost nothing and seems always to be falling to pieces? To what extent must we sacrifice our own relationships to produce art, and is it ever worth it to do so? How does friendship evolve over time? How do we deal with the terrible realization that a friend or lover does not care about us nearly as much as we care about them?

I won’t say that Metallic Realms exactly answers any of these questions, which is good, since they are essentially unanswerable. But beneath the slapstick comedy and Mike’s buffoonery and the occasional hints that some very bad things might be going on, there is real love for science fiction, for writers of all kinds, for people who try their best to make something beautiful or at least entertaining in spite of all the awfulness of the world. The Orb 4 did not produce any great works of science fiction, but they did make things, and that counts for a lot. Finishing the novel filled me with the desire to join a writing collective myself and see what sorts of terrible short stories I could help create.

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