Lincoln Michel is one of the finest writers working today, along with being a heavy hitter on literary Substack. We’re delighted to share an excerpt from his recently released novel, Metallic Realms, a delightfully unhinged and characteristically brilliant work of bizarre and poignant confession — or, as Michel puts it, “Pale Fire meets Star Trek.”
—The Editors
Foreword: The High Cost of Galaxies
Dear reader, gird yourself. These pages aren’t mere paper but a portal to (arguably) one of the greatest achievements in science fiction imagination of the twenty-first century in any subgenre, language, or artistic medium. As a fan, I quake with jealousy. I wish I too were freshly encountering the manifold wonders of The Star Rot Chronicles. The ensuing tales are apt to sear into your mind more powerfully than most milestones of so-called “real life.” I close my eyes — here in this cold basement where I compose these notes — and scenes appear as films projected upon the insides of my eyelids. The escape from the solar whale! The great war of the Adamites! The chilling return of — Oh, I must stop myself. No spoilers in my scholarship. I can recall these moments with greater clarity than my first kiss,1 high school graduation, or even the tragic events of 9/11 that so defined the America of my young adulthood.
As your intrepid editor and Star Rot whisperer, I’ll confess I occasionally ponder how my life might’ve differed if I’d never discovered The Star Rot Chronicles. Likely, I’d have finished law school. There’d be no possible warrant for my arrest. I might have a steady job. A mortgage. A loving partner. The patter of pajamaed feet running up the stairs of my two-story suburban home; I pivot in my ergonomic office chair to see a young boy and girl in matching striped jammies rush to hug my legs and then look up with wide-eyed cherub faces to say, “Daddy, we love you. Daddy, you are special. Daddy, you are our universe.”
Pedestrian pleasures. I have another universe, and it is the Metallic Realms.
Just what are The Star Rot Chronicles? Put simply, they’re a cycle of interconnected space opera tales detailing the adventures of the ragtag crew of the good ship Star Rot in a sector of the galaxy known as the Metallic Realms. That you’re likely encountering them for the first time represents two tragedies. First, the narrow-minded, backwards-looking parochialism of the Ivory Tower elites who jealously guard the walled city of Literature™ and recoil in terror at the first sign of imagination, shouting, “Genre barbarians, stay away! We’re afraid of your wonderous plots and fantastic characters! Your uncanny visions challenge our perceptions! Leave, please, for we are frightened!”
The second tragedy is the untimely dissolution of the Orb 4, the artistic collective slash literary movement slash science fiction philosophy that created the otherworldly tales before collapsing under the very earthly pressures of jealousy, love, greed, and (as I will argue in my ensuing analysis) undiagnosed mental health issues.
It’s a wild and improbable story. And like all memorable tales it ends in tragedy. For now, suffice to say The Star Rot Chronicles were the creation of several of the finest minds science fiction has produced this millennium: Taras K. Castle, Darya Azali, Jane Noh Johnson, and S.O.S. Merlin. To have known them at their creative peak, as I did, was something special indeed. They exuded imagination as effortlessly as the blort worms of Delta Red secrete toxic gas.2 I hope my accompanying commentary will shed light on their individual personalities and provide insight into why the Orb 4 was, like a core-collapse supernova, destined to implode.
Uncanny. An explosion outside the window of this dim basement where I compose these notes. The gunshot of some illiterate hunter walking past the No Trespassing signs, one hopes. For a moment, I thought I saw dark figures hiding behind the trees. They moved from trunk to trunk. The police circling the house for ambush? But the figments vanished. Hallucinations conjured by my addled and Adderalled mind operating on thirty-six hours without sleep. Looking now, I see only the blueish white expanse of the frozen world. Snow is falling. It patters against the pane. I pull the shawl tighter around my shoulders.
All is quiet except for the squawking imitation car alarm of my parrot, Arthur C. Caique. (A habit he regrettably picked up back in Brooklyn.) As I shiver by the space heater, surrounded by my copious notes, I cannot help but look back on The Star Rot Chronicles with both fondness and regret. Could I have done more to save the collective? Could I have prevented the ultimate tragedy? No. I must not think this way. My task is preservation, not self-recrimination.
The stories collected here represent all verified canonical entries. It’s impossible to know how many fragments, sketches, and final drafts have been kept from this volume because of human pettiness. A veritable Library of Alexandria of contemporary science fiction may be forever lost. However, I’m delighted to announce to Rotties (as fans are wont to call themselves) a never-before-published Star Rot Chronicles entry will appear as a bonus addendum.
Each tale herein uses the most recent draft available in the Orb 4’s Google Drive folder — of which I was given explicit and unrestrained access to, none can dispute. The only editorial liberties I’ve taken are to remove the occasional “exposition dumps” that were needed when these tales were published individually yet proved redundant when compiled in a single collection.
My goal in this volume is two-fold. First, to preserve for posterity the vital literary output of the Orb 4 even as — nay, especially as — the group’s collapse risks consigning this era-defining work to the dustbin of literary history. (I will not let that happen, Taras.) Secondly, after plucking the stories from said dustbin and brushing them clean, I aim to provide readers with the necessary context for understanding and appreciation. Each story will be accompanied by my scholarly notes, relevant memories, thematic unpacking, and explanations of the singular lore of The Star Rot Chronicles. Although I am prone to occasional hyperbole, I will endeavor to restrict myself to purely scholarly assessment in this volume. Time willing, I shall draw a few maps.
I must compose my notes sequentially with minimal time for revision or backtracking. Luckily, I have copious notes to pull from including the Google Drive files, group chat messages, private recordings,3 the official Star Rot Chronicles Lore Bible, and my own (94% recall) memories. My remarks will be robust. Still, I beg my readers forgiveness for any typos or continuity errors.
On that note, allow me to welcome you to the Metallic Realms. As the lovable scoundrel Aul-Wick might say, “Let’s blast off so the adventure never ends!”
Yours in science fiction and scholarship,
Michael Lincoln, B.A.
Scholar, Writer, Senior Lore Keeper, Editor, Fan
Introduction: An Ear at the Edge of the Universe
Why I Am the Most Qualified to Write this Volume
Before we begin, you might be wondering why yours truly has the honor of chronicling the rise and fall of the Metallic Realms? Simple. I was there. Reader, I was there! I saw the highs of imagination. I saw the lows of interpersonal drama. And I saw it all, like a stenographer fly on the wall, from my disheveled bed.
Allow me to explain.
Our tale commences in the winter chill of Brooklyn in January. The sidewalks are a mélange of slush, rock salt, and dog urine. The mood is grim. The people sour. The Metallic Realms are but a dream in the mind of a young man named Taras K. Castle whose genius is wasted at ThoughtFunnel writing sponsored content for corporate brands desperate to “tap into” the millennial market as if our generation were maple trees whose sappy blood was made of monetizable data. Taras awakes to incessant beeping. Is it his cell phone pinging with witty memes from his old pal Michael? No. His phone is on vibrate. He sniffs the air. Smoke. An alarm. Fire! Taras scrambles out of the apartment into the cold and uncaring NYC streets, carrying nothing but his laptop and his life.
If the multiverse exists, there are infinite realities in which The Star Rot Chronicles are never written. In those dystopian timelines, the book in your hands never exists and the field of science fiction is notably impoverished. Luckily, we exist in this timeline, so this is only the inciting incident of our tale.
After this mysterious fire and firemen’s hosing left Taras K. Castle’s one-bedroom apartment a smoldering and soggy ruin, he moved into my apartment. I’d recently acquired the lease on a capacious walk-up apartment in Bushwick. It was a converted warehouse space on the top floor of a squat brick building. The unassuming entrance was squeezed between a dollar slice joint (Famous Jay’s Original 99 Cent Pizza) and a hardware store (Tool Town). The ceiling’s exposed pipes and the floor’s intermittent divots gave the unit an urban “glamping” vibe reminiscent of my Vermont childhood. The apartment had three bedrooms and a large kitchen slash dining slash living slash family room. Taras’s bedroom was beside mine and down the hall lay the bedroom of my other roommate, Cast. More on them later.
Taras slept on an air mattress for a few days, returning to his apartment to forage for items and deal with the inspectors. Taras’s life had long been punctuated by misfortune. Ever since his younger brother’s tragic death at the age of five, Taras felt a black cloud lingered over his family. A curse from the old country. He hadn’t been able to lose it even among the gleaming towers of New York City.
In any event, I was pleased to offer a place to rest and reboot. “Thanks, Mike. It’ll probably only be for a few weeks. God, what a shit year.” Taras and I were old friends. We had the bond of warriors who’d fought side by side in the demon-filled dungeons of public school. I knew we’d get through this latest struggle together.
What should I say about Taras? He seemed to have been engineered in utero as an artist. When we were children, he could turn anything from Legos to Silly Putty into a creative outlet. In high school, he dabbled as a DJ, made amateur films, and mapped complex dungeons for RPG campaigns. But his main love was the written word. By the time he had graduated college, he’d completed an entire oeuvre (albeit unpublished) of screenplays, comics, and short stories. Then, a breakthrough. He began a series of space adventure tales titled The Curious Voyages of the Incurious Captain Baldwin. I’d discovered the drafts on a members-only SFF board that Taras mentioned in passing. It took me a while to track them down. Reader, I was ensorcelled.
The tales combined the high adventures of Buck Rogers with the philosophical concerns of New Wave wizards like Le Guin, Wolfe, Delany, and Dick. Brief as they were, they seemed to encompass all science fiction. A cyberpunk tone would mingle with slipstream worldbuilding in a post-apocalyptic plot of steampunk machines and cosmic horror creations. I was more shocked and delighted when, months later, I learned he’d formed a writing collective with his girlfriend, Darya Azali, and a friend from college, Jane Noh Johnson. The three were collaborating on a science fiction universe. Each brings their own literary strengths, as would future Orb 4 member S.O.S. Merlin. But Taras was the nucleus. Everyone spun around him.
As I was myself an aspiring hybrid author-critic-editor lacking direction — a sort of literary ronin, one might say — I wondered if my services might prove useful. I dropped hints that his collective might have an eligible beta reader nearby. Taras seemed pained at my generosity. “I keep telling you we’re just goofing around and probably won’t publish anything,” he says with his typical modesty.4 “But I’ll let you know.”
Daily persistence was rewarded. Taras arrived at my bedroom door with a knock and a sigh. “If you want to read, here you go. Just please don’t share them online or anything.”
If the early stories were promising, these were revelations. Poring over those drafts at night, I knew I’d found my calling. Good riddance, law school. Hello, Metallic Realms.
On Our Appetite for the Astonishing
When did the seeds of imagination germinate in the soil of Taras’s soul? Was the frozen rural New England landscape of our childhood a blank canvas that his mind filled with monsters, heroes, and wonders? Such mysteries will be investigated over the course of this volume as I elucidate the codes, allusions, and hidden meanings of The Star Rot Chronicles. That is not to say that the biographical details that informed the compositions — and of which I was frequently present to witness — are the “key” to “unlocking” them. One of the surest signs of our debasement as a culture is the insistence that fiction is biography. That the mystery and ineffability of art can be decoded by the cheap facts one would find on the Early Life section of a Wikipedia page. I blame psychology and social media for this trend. It is a scourge. Illiteracy. A disgrace.
And yet. Perhaps a careful scholar, stepped in the lore of his subject and working with first-hand knowledge of their lived tropes, may divine insights from the real-world facts of an author’s life. After all, no one creates work in a vacuum. Now is the point at which to reveal my history with Taras K. Castle. To say Taras and I were old friends does a disservice to our bond. We were the oldest of friends. Our mothers were in Lamaze class together. We crawled into the world mere weeks apart. In the photos my parents intermittently text me, we appear as two identical pale blobs swaddled in blue fabric. You could not tell which of us would become the artist and which the scholar.
Although the Castle family lived only a neighborhood away, my family’s address was shuffled into the newly opened elementary school during second grade.5 The first day of class, I was desolate. Who were these strange beings in braids and blue jeans attempting to steal my pipe cleaners? Their hands were sticky with ichor (dried glue) and their faces streaked with bright markings (melted candy). I knew not their rites or customs. I felt like a space explorer crashed on a forbidden planet without even a snarky robot sidekick to aid me.
Luckily, weekends existed. My mother would drop me off at the Castle’s place with a fanny pack filled with mixed nuts and organic juice boxes. The Castle House. A brown split-level home with a steep driveway at the end of the cul-de-sac. This was my escape from the torments of elementary school. The side door would open and there, framed in the electric light of the garage, would be Taras. We’d raid his parents’ pantry, which was much better stocked than my own,6 and run laughing into the backyard. Ah, those golden days of summer spent ripping open silver snack bags as we leaped around his trampoline.
It was during these playdates that our proclivities toward the marvelous went into hyperdrive. He introduced me to Metroid and I explained the plot of Star Wars. As we got older, we swapped copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for tomes of Tolkien. Finally, we were reunited in ninth grade — the area’s twin middle schools fed into the same behemoth high — and debated Atwood and Gibson in the back of the cafeteria.
We weren’t the happiest boys. Or perhaps I should speak only for myself. I was diagnosed with ADHD in kindergarten and my harried mother crammed my mouth with Ritalin before plopping me in front of a television. School was hard. Other children alternatively cruel and aloof. These purveyors of the imagination were like magical armor that protected me from the taunts of girls and the jeers of boys. What did I care of earthly torments when galaxies of adventure awaited me in the pages of my library books?
One time at the lunch table, while comparing our Warhammer 40k Chaos Marine paint jobs, Taras gestured his honey BBQ-soaked nugget at my Nurgle daemon. “Dude, we should create our own monsters. We could come up with some cool ones, right? Hell, why not make our own universe?”
“For Ms. Henderson’s class?” I thought he was referring to our biology diorama project.7
“No, dude. Like. Why can’t we think up our own Star Wars? Come up with our own aliens and planets and ships and shit. Goof around and make an RPG or something.”
“Yes!” I said, shouted almost. “I’d love to.”
“Cool.”
We bumped fists. My mind tumbled a full load of ideas. Peculiar creatures. Cool spaceships. Unknown and uncanny worlds. I couldn’t wait to get home and begin writing. A science fiction universe to make with Taras by my side, the co-god of our creation. I have been looking for that feeling ever since.
Alas. We never got around to it. Although I composed some initial notes, I was struck down by the plague: mononucleosis. By the time I recovered, an engrossing entry in the Final Fantasy JRPG series occupied my time. The usual exams and holidays. Summer camp. Boy Scouts. Before I knew it, we were graduating. College and the terrors of adulthood loomed. It was as if God had pressed fast forward on my life.
Taras and I drifted apart. Separate colleges. Grad school in different cities. Failed careers. Life.
Years passed. Eons, it felt.
Sigh. Reflecting on my distant youth, it feels like my life has been a stroll down one long and dimly lit hallway where each year another dozen doors lock shut. The possibilities dwindle. Now I amble around, tugging at immovable handles, unsure of the exit. How did I end up in my thirties as a law school dropout living with roommates with no clear career, creative, or romantic paths before me? I fear I’m drifting from my task. I hereby end this musing, except to say that what I admired about Taras was his bold assurance. While I dithered, Taras dove into the task. He became an artist. He conjured his universe.
And he conjured it in conjunction with others, as I’ve mentioned. Initially, these were Jane Noh Johnson and Darya Azali. Taras allowed me to read several of the group’s early story drafts, including “Comets Falling like Tears from a Lonely Sky,” “I Am Antimatter,” and “GODBOT 9000.” I reread each until I could nearly recite them. I also noticed a few plot holes that Taras was oddly uninterested in discussing. “Yeah, well, these are just sketches. Practice. A way to flesh out the characters and world, you know?” This proved true. None of those early tales are counted in the official chronology.
Still, you can understand my excitement when Taras convened a meeting of the Orb 4 in my apartment a few weeks after he moved in. Jane was in a New School dorm for her graduate studies and Darya’s Cobble Hill studio apartment was too small. The authors of the works I’d been studying would be sitting in my chairs and conjuring worlds with breaths drawn from the same air that circulated in my unworthy lungs. It was also the day that the real and true canonical Star Rot Chronicles #1 would debut.
How I Joined My First Orb 4 Meeting
Picture the scene. Your humble narrator sits in his bedroom, fidgeting. Should he run out and wipe down the tables again? Rearrange the outward facing books on the shelves? No. That’d be fanboyish. Yet his excitement is so uncontrolled his bladder starts to loosen. (This man has suffered a small bladder his whole life, causing many problems at theme parks and college lectures.) He sprints to the bathroom. The doorbell dings mid-stream. He cinches and presses his eye to the crack of the bathroom door, which peers out into the common area. The giants are arriving.
First to enter is Jane Noh Johnson. A lithe woman with asymmetrical bangs, ripped black jeans, and tattoos of sharks swimming up her left arm. On that same arm, she wears two leather bracelets: one black with spiked studs and one pink with silver hearts. These bracelets symbolize the two tendencies at war within Jane. She is equal parts bold visionary and quiet wallflower, thoughtful friend and standoffish lone wolf. Yes, she’s a Gemini. Jane’s dual nature also extends to her fiction, as she is currently enrolled in an MFA program writing dreary literary realism alongside the escapades of The Star Rot Chronicles.
Jane and Taras met in a college creative writing class, and then worked together on a college’s lit mag named Plums in the Icebox.8 Jane moved home to Houston post-college. After a couple years living rent-free but “paying in massive psychological damage” she was accepted to the New School’s MFA program. The two scribblers reunited in the core of the Big Apple.
As Jane hangs her jacket, I realize I’ve left the bathroom light on. I flick the switch and peer out from the safety of darkness. “Yo, yo.” Her voice is low and mysterious. Without waiting for a response, she drifts specter-like into the common area and alights on the windowsill to scroll her phone.
After Jane comes Darya Azali, who stomps confidently into the room (she doesn’t remove her Doc Martens) and flings a denim jacket on the back of a chair. Darya is shorter and more Rubenesque than Jane. There is a nobility in her profile and a subtle grandeur to her carriage. Her hair has been dyed a cotton-candy blue and she wears a crisp yellow T-shirt that says Yubaba’s Bathhouse – No Face? No Entry.
Darya is the loud and proud geek of the group, a dedicated cosplayer and a declared member of “more than a dozen fandoms” ranging from Sailor Moon to Supernatural. She is currently debating adding “either ASOIAF or ACOTAR to my roster.”9 Plus, in her non-geek life is a genuine scientist! Having recently obtained an MS in Marine Biology, she is well-poised to add scientific rigor along with fandom cred to the Orb 4.
Darya and Taras met at the local sock hop of our age: Tinder. Taras accidentally “super liked” while wiping a smudge off his screen. He almost deleted the app in embarrassment. During the ensuing date, Darya took him to an art show in Chelsea where they supped on free cheese cubes and stale crackers. Taras, ever the gentleman, accompanied her to her subway entrance. Their lips locked as the train rattled beneath. Possibly he’d have ghosted her, or she ghosted him, or both ghosted mutually as was the custom. However, in one of those magical New York City moments they ran into each other in line for bagels a week later. He was holding an egg and cheese on everything, and she was fighting with the cashier over what counted as a “schmear” of blueberry cream cheese. She turned to say “Can you believe this?” to the next person in line only to discover it was Taras. “There’s no point trying to ghost fate,” he told me later.
“Where’s Taras?” Darya says as she lays a container of homemade cookies on the table.
Jane doesn’t look up from her phone. “Dunno.”
“Hey, T!”
“One sec.”
What’s to be said of Taras, my steadfast friend? He’s a kind and somewhat unkempt man. Laconic and ironic, he speaks only when words are necessary yet one can never be quite sure when he’s joking. I watch as he strolls past the bathroom. His six-foot-one frame, scraggly hair, and red-tinged scruff make him appear as a mythic warrior teleported from the battlefield to twenty-first century Brooklyn. He grips his sword — Muji 0.5mm gel ink pen — in his smooth right hand as he strides into the wine-dark room.
Taras waves to Jane, who comments on “the weird smell” (presumably something in the hallway). He offers her one of my pamplemousse LaCroixs, which I hadn’t authorized yet would have given willingly. She cracks the can as Taras embraces Darya. During the kiss, Darya seems to notice me through the slit of the bathroom door. Her eyes widen. I sink back into the gloom.
The meeting begins. I watch them gesture wildly, their ideas fluttering in the air like doves released from a magician’s hat. Yet I can’t hear from this distance. They seem to be discussing a plotline involving black holes or possibly wormholes. Oh, the gulf that exists between such holes! I find myself overpowered with a desire to be closer to the proceedings. To soar like Icarus near the dazzling sun of creativity.
I tiptoe out and conduct small tasks in the living room — fixing a lightbulb, washing dishes, misting ferns, etc. — while pretending not to pay attention. I have earbuds in, nothing playing. I wear my Battlestar Galactica t-shirt and hum the theme song from The X Files. Surely, I’ll be noticed.
I’m not. The Orb 4 are so single-minded nothing else registers.
“So, is it telepathy? Or telekinesis?”
“It’s both! Like Aul-Wick — that’s the fish alien pilot — can telepathically speak through other characters by telekinetically controlling their vocal cords.”
“Huh. Cool.”
I could be dancing the cancan or dissecting an extraterrestrial on the kitchen island and they wouldn’t notice. Nothing can distract them from their task. I opt for action.
“This seat free?”
“Ah. Did you want to join?” Taras says, feeling out my interest.
I flutter my hands. “I could never join.” Well, not yet, I tell myself. When in Rome, wait around until everyone assumes you’re just another Roman.
They nod.
“I’ll just eat my humble victuals at the table.”
They look at each other. I hide my enthusiasm as best I can.
“Alert! Intruder! Alert!” Darya says in an outdated — even offensive — robotic voice. (Sometimes I wonder how she managed to write the thrilling tales attributed to her. Did Taras ghostwrite?)10
“Well, it’s your place,” Jane says.
Taking Jane’s assent as sacrosanct, I go to the stove to cook my evening’s repast. Macaroni and cheese with extra cheese. The water boils. The collective recommences fleshing out the universe of the Metallic Realms. Taras is explaining his concept of the setting, which takes place thousands of years in the future when the Earthian empire has expanded across the stars, crested, and collapsed. The current time is known in-universe as the Unending Decay. “It’s a time when the galactic order has begun to crumble. People are torn apart by factionalism, misinformation, and the looming threat that things may get worse and worse each year.”
Jane snorts. “Can’t imagine what that’s like.”
“I might have borrowed a bit from the news. Heh.”
While stirring cheese dust into the writhing noodles, I can’t help myself. I giggle.
“Everything all right?” Jane says.
“Yes, very.” I stir the pot. “Only, I couldn’t help thinking how this mac and cheese is reminiscent of the maggot flotilla on Rygol 9.”
“You.” A pause. “You know about Rygol 9?”
Taras leaps to my defense with a quick whisper. “I left a draft of ‘Flight from the Feral Sun’11 in the recycling pile.”
“It had a few coffee stains but was no worse for wear,” I say.
Silence. Glances exchanged. The realization they’re in the presence of a true fan.
Then inspiration hits and Jane begins describing a civilization of “alien mockingbirds” who mimic the hailing signals of other species in generation ships built like giant nests. I tiptoe over and occupy the empty chair. The mac and cheese is quite squeaky. I’ve overcooked it in my effort to overhear. I chew softly, letting the noodles dissolve on my tongue before swallowing the resulting mush.
“That’s a big bowl of mac,” Jane says, oddly. I’m eating out of a standard popcorn bowl and have used only one Family Fun box.
“A growing boy.” I wink. “Please continue.”
After another pause, Taras rises to full height with a stack of papers in his large hands. “Here’s what I’ve got to start,” he says. “I’ve updated it with ideas we kicked around at the last meeting. Jane, I know you still haven’t decided on a character yet, but we’ll figure out an origin story when you do.”
Throughout these proceedings, I sit as their creative juices wash over me like a tidal wave. Exhilarating is too modest a word. The back-and-forth exchange of ideas. The way one concept splits off in new directions like branches of a tree. How each darling they kill comes back stronger, in zombie form. It thrills. This is what I dream to achieve in my own scribblings. This is art.
Those who tell you they don’t want to know how the sausage is made have been munching on very poor links indeed. This sausage? It was filled with stars.
Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln finds his life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic lives of the pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns — he has a higher calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written word: The Star Rot Chronicles.
Written collectively by Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit science fiction writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to extraterrestrial romances and interstellar wars. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished — until now.
But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest universe ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the fun house reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one mission: to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost.
Lincoln Michel’s newest novel, Metallic Realms, was published by Atria Books this May. His previous books are the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the novel The Body Scout (Orbit), which was named one of the ten best SFF books of 2021 by the New York Times and one of the fifty best science fiction of all time by Esquire. His short stories appear in The Paris Review, The Baffler, Granta, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. He runs the craft and publishing Substack Counter Craft.
Admittedly, I remember less about the kiss — a dry peck from Jenny Taylor — than the aftermath, when Taras informed me that a picture was circulating the cafeteria featuring my chapped lips (it was winter) stretching toward Taylor’s grimacing face. It’d been a dare. Teenagers are crueler than any galactic tyrant.
See “Memoirs of My Metallic Realms – Part II.”
Fully legal by my reading of the State of New York’s one-party consent law.
If only he were able to hold this book in his well-moisturized hands!
Kafka imagined no bureaucracy as nightmarish as Vermont school districting!
My father was a purveyor of soul-killing “health food” store named, bizarrely, The Barley Bard. Their logo was a cartoonish Hamlet saying, “To fu or not tofu?” No, the pun did not work.
I ended up getting a C- because Ms. Henderson claimed that the forest moon of Endor didn’t count as “a real ecosystem.” My grade was docked further after I said, quite factually, that she was displaying “the same genocidal mindset as Darth Vader and the Empire.”
What I would give to see their early output! Sadly, none appears online. Two of Jane’s poems — “Your Texts Have No Effects,” and “Seven Ways of Looking at a Country You’ll Never Know” — are listed in the table of contents of the Volume 5: Spring issue of Plums in the Icebox. However, the magazine appears to be defunct and my attempts to order a copy received only a mailer daemon reply.
A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin and A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, respectively.
Stratfordians, look away! I’ve downloaded software used to analyze Shakespeare’s plays for clues at his true identity. I’ve run analyses on the Orb 4 tales to see if Taras ghostwrote them all. The freeware version has produced inconclusive results.
This story was abandoned for reasons unknown. I have excluded it from the official chronology and this volume.
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Incredible. I'm so excited to read the full novel! Love an unreliable narrator.
The piece has a lively, fluid style and an amusing comic vibe. Fun read.