Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel
Mattia Ravasi
Michael Lincoln, the narrator-cum-curator of Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel – yes – is well aware of this injustice, but shrugs it off with the unshakable self-assurance of the true fanatic. Underemployed, broke, and decidedly unpopular, Michael is however a scholar – if only in his own mind. He is the official “Lore Keeper” of the Star Rot Chronicles, a series of science fiction stories created by a collective of aspiring writers called Orb 4. Taras, the leader of this collective, is Michael’s oldest childhood friend; he and the other three members – Jane, Darya, and Merlin – all come together in Michael and Taras’ Brooklyn apartment to cook up inventive tales centered around a spaceship named Star Rot and its ragtag crew of misfits and daredevils.
Metallic Realms is, in fact, a novel masquerading as an edited compendium, giving us all nine Star Rot stories that compose the series’ canon. These are extremely engaging tales with memorable characters – the genderfluid android Algorithm, the fish-man pilot Aul-Wick – facing terrible odds, alien fanatics, and space whales as big as planets. They are fun stories in their own right, but they also present a long and motley homage to the history and possibilities of the science fiction genre. They range, in tone and flavor, from the high-octane adventure sci-fi of the golden age, with its overt social and political commentary, to the introspective experimental science fiction of Italo Calvino and other postmodernist writers, all the way to the philosophical and technological dilemmas of cyberpunk. They are love letters to the genre composed by devotee aficionados, and by struggling writers who cherish the simple act of creating beautiful worlds together, swapping stories with each other.
What complicates this picture, turning it from a self-conscious nod to the genre to an intricate metafictional puzzle, is the heavy hand of its unforgettable curator. Michael is the editor of the collection you hold in your hands, and the author of its Introduction. And of its Foreword. And of the commentary to all the stories, the Afterword, and the After-Afterword. The depth of Michael’s passion for the Star Rot Chronicles is astounding, as is his conviction that what he is working on, and presenting to you, is one of the all-time great works of the science fictional genre. It becomes apparent soon enough, however, that Michael might also have other reasons for wanting to put his own version of the story of the Orb 4 collective out in the world; for wanting to get ahead of “the distortions, fabrications, and outright slanders” that have been spread about him since an ominous and unspecified tragedy…
Fandom loves nothing more than name-dropping, connections, and nods; what Jonathan Lethem, speaking of pop music, calls the “intertextual erotics” of popular culture. Perhaps because this enthusiasm is contagious, the temptation is strong to discuss Metallic Realms by simply stringing together a series of comparisons. Michel’s novel engages with nerd culture as extensively and adoringly as Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. In its casual use of genre references, and its depiction of a strong (but treacherous) friendship between geeks, it calls to mind Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Going forward, I will do my best to resist this temptation; yet two further books must be mentioned to place the novel’s brilliance within context. Curiously, neither of them is a genre novel, nor do they engage with genre at all.
The first, and most obvious, is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, another novel written by a delusional (and hilarious) scholar and composed in the form of annotations to another writer’s work. Metallic Realms even opens with a Nabokov quote, albeit a distorted one, warping Nabokov’s distaste for science fiction into a declaration of love (with the excuse that the former “must have been an autocorrect error!”) and revealing to us from the outset quite how many liberties our narrator is going to take with his source material. The other is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, whose protagonist, laze-about aspiring writer Ignatius J. Reilly, in many ways calls to mind our Micheal, with his baseless self-assurance and loose working ethics. Ignatius, like Michael, might not be an upstanding guy, but it’s hard to deny that the people with whom both brush shoulders in the straight world are hardly models of integrity or good character either.
Much of Metallic Realms’ genius resides in how acrobatically its narrator manages to walk the line between utter, possibly criminal, madness, and the normal (if overzealous) behavior of a “mere” fanatic. While in many ways Michael falls into the stereotype of the obsessed, nerdy loser (to much comic effect throughout the book), he is also capable of surprisingly astute political and social observations. He is skeptical of certain conservative trends within fandom, such as the backlash against the Star Wars franchise for supposedly turning political. He believes the message at the heart of Star Trek to be little more than a cheap spin on American imperialism. He even takes issue with the term “neckbeard” because it is exclusionary of female geeks! His detailed and, at times, sorrowful characterization saves him from coming across as an amusing but predictable trope (that of the know-it-all nerd, an updated version on The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy), and allows him to shine as a truly tridimensional character.
As we dive deeper into the Star Rot stories, and we learn to filter out Michael’s own views on their authors from what we are reading, Metallic Realms acquires an increasingly surprising, disturbing, and sad dimension. Something clearly wrong lies at the heart of Michael’s attachment to Taras; the other members of Orb 4 might not value his help as much as he thinks; his obsession for the crew of the spaceship Star Rot might be something more than a healthy pastime. Paradoxically, all of these realizations – in the reader, if not in Michael’s own distorted world-view – only end up supporting one of Michael’s convictions: that these wondrous stories, just like the great works of science fiction, offer an alternative to the inescapable problems of drab and dreadful existence, an escape into imagination that is also a thought-out vision of a scientifically accurate universe. (Michael, with the typical ardor of a zealot, is skeptical of the fantasy genre precisely because of its ascientific fancifulness, even while clearly partial to a few fantasy franchises.) And Michael is not alone, by all means, in cherishing this escape. As their problems mount – monetary and societal pressures, romantic difficulties, quarrels and misunderstandings – the Orb 4 writers find themselves cherishing all the more deeply the power of their stories to bring them together, all while the world is pulling them apart.
Metallic Realms is a brilliant enigma, a novel in layers that works as an ode to worldbuilding and imagination and, at the same time, as a cautionary tale about the dangers of losing oneself in one’s fantasies. It is bound to resonate deeply with all fans of the genre, especially those of us who have at one point or another dreamt of literary greatness: of joining the hallowed and sneered-upon ranks of the science fiction masters, the titans of a world that used to feel like an exclusive misfits club and has now become mainstream fare. It’s a hilarious book with a hard core of sadness, and it is gutsy enough to take itself further than I would have suspected from its opening pages. The Star Rot stories shine with luminous passion for the genre, while Michael’s insane commentary manages to reach ever new heights of mania and absurdity.
Ultimately, the wondrous paradox of Metallic Realms is that it creates exactly the fictional world it is trying to convey. Not so much the interstellar wastes and dangerous planets explored by the crew of the Star Rot, but the world imagined by our Lore Keeper, Micheal, and not just imagined but coaxed into being through stubbornness, abundant delusion, and at least a certain amount of crime; a world where the Star Rot Chronicles, a handful of tales written by four bratty young people, is regarded as one of the great franchises in science fiction. By the end of the novel, I felt as if the Star Rot fandom did indeed exist: as if I had been exposed to a rich and complex universe, full of depths and nuances, as worthy of obsessing over as any big-budget TV series or blockbuster movie. Michael’s enthusiasm, no matter how misguided, is utterly infectious. The Orb 4 writers might not always want him around, but it is him, ultimately and disturbingly, who turns their stories into a work of art.
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