This is the kind of book you pitch by analogy: JG Ballard meets Gabrielle Zevin; Isaac Asimov meets Stephen Chbosky; Ready Player One meets Love, Simon (replete with ferris wheel). I’ve been describing it to friends as a YA Kazuo Ishiguro set adrift in Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. It turns out I have two kinds of friends: those who hear that description as praise, and those who heed it as a warning.
Novels that demand comparisons rarely survive them. This one does (though it could do without that mawkish ferris wheel). American author Portia Elan’s debut is a gentle hymn to found families – the kin we choose rather than inherit – and it’s fitting that it reads that way, assembled from allegiances. Elan knows what her characters will discover: stories are how we claim one another.
One comparison feels indispensable: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas – that beloved, metafictional mind-bender. Elan is less oblique and tricksy than Mitchell (where he alludes, she underlines). But Homebound still has a puzzle-box thrill – the click of pieces locking into place. The family resemblance is unmistakable: four interleaved stories of four women divided by time, but bound to each other; their connections as cryptic as they are inevitable.
In 1983, in the beige sprawl of suburban Cincinnati, Becks grieves her uncle. Something essential is being left unsaid about his death, but also about his life (“Everyone is always sparing me the details”). Becks is many things: spiky daughter, smitten friend, zine-rock fangirl and aspiring programmer. Might her inheritance – a pile of floppy disks – help her decode her place in the world?
In 2078, integrative biologist Dr Tamar Portman designs sentient humanoids (Ayes) with minds like ecosystems: collective, reparative, symbiotic. They are intended as planet-healers (“Their primary responsibility isn’t to humans or human things”), but Tamar’s investors have more venal ambitions, and the means to realise them. Bound by a corporate NDA, Tamar drafts emails she will never send to a friend we never meet. But every keystroke leaves a trace; so does every story she feeds her machines. The Ayes have ears.
In 2586, salt-hardened Yesiko captains the salvage ship Babylon, scraping a living from the remnants of a drowned world. She carries a debt she can’t outrun: the cost of the nano-medicine keeping her crewmate, Root, alive. He’s her ballast, a keeper of stories, but the treatment is failing and so is the myth of their self-sufficiency.
Finally, in the interstellar darkness, Lt California Solo pilots a mission to save a fleet of stalled starships: Solo by name, solo by assignment. She’s the heroine of a text-based computer game – the pixelated equivalent of a Choose Your Own Adventure comic. What choices will keep her story alive? And who, exactly, is making them?
Family secrets, robot reckonings, queer becomings, lonely spacefarers, drowned futures and great floods: we’ve read it all before. But that’s the point. Homebound is a novel of inheritance: the shared grammar of folklore and ritual, prayer and pop culture. This is the rope that keeps us “safely tethered to history”, the way the living remain in conversation with the dead. Becks finds belonging in the sweaty thrum of a rock concert. The Ayes observe a day of rest to refresh their circuitry. A copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved travels with the crew of the Babylon. Lt Solo borrows her surname from a galaxy far, far away. “We are our stories,” Root tells Yesiko. “We show respect to the stories, and they keep us.” He teaches her the weekly pause of Shabbat, and the mourner’s Kaddish. She carries them on.
Elan’s most elusive consciousness is an Aye called Chaya, a passenger on the Babylon, and a relic of the world before the flood. They could be a prophet; they could be a malfunction; they could be both. But Chaya is the robot Walt Whitman might have imagined, had he been a tech bro instead of a poet: plural and multitudinous. We meet “the self that learned the cost of shame” and “the self that learned to believe”. Chaya speaks to us in chorus: “We are more than a robot. We must be. Although we always doubt and question.” There are plenty of knotty, metaphysical questions here, as there always are when machines start dreaming, but the most AI-urgent is also the oldest: what care do we owe one another?
In their own ways, all Elan’s characters are seeking a salve for loneliness: “the possibility of another like us, somewhere in the vast darkness of the universe”. The author tends to oblige. The quiet promise of her novel is that your people are out there, even if they aren’t technically human. Homebound is sentimental, soft-hearted and guileless – the adjectives critics tend to use sneeringly, as though kindness were easy. It’s the sort of book that might have kept my younger self company. I’m glad this generation will have it.
• Homebound by Portia Elan is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
