This Weightless World
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
"It's precisely Soto's refusal to be 'weighted' down by decades of genre tradition, to instead turn the trope on its head and in doing so remind us that no-one but ourselves is coming to save us, that makes This Weightless World such an exciting and radical novel." —Ian Monde, Locus
"Set in Silicon Valley and Chicago, This Weightless World considers questions of morality in a world where people feel powerless in the face of formidable systemic forces." —Laura Adamczyk, A.V. Club
A literary debut subverting classic sci-fi tropes set in gentrified Chicago, Silicon Valley, and across the vastness of the cosmos.
From the streets of gentrified Chicago, to the tech boom corridors of Silicon Valley, This Weightless World follows a revolving cast of characters after alien contact upends their lives.
We are introduced to Sevi, a burned-out music teacher desperate for connection; Ramona, his on-again, off-again computer programmer girlfriend; and Sevi’s cello protégé Eason, struggling with the closure of his high school; after a mysterious signal arrives from outer space. When the signal—at first seen as a sign of hope—stops as abruptly as it started, they are all forced to reckon with its aftermath. In San Francisco, Sevi fights to find meaning in rekindled love; and Ramona–determined to build an AI to prevent mankind’s self-destruction–begins to feel the weight of past mistakes. And in Chicago, Eason measures his commitment to an estranged childhood friend against the chance of escaping neighborhood troubles.
A dazzling deconstruction of science-fiction tropes, This Weightless World looks to the past for a vision of the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Soto's debut, a purported alien contact novel, disappoints, arguably lacking both aliens and contact. Like characters in a 1970s New Yorker story, his raft of protagonists drift verbosely through purposeless lives—among them Sevi del Toro, a cellist who settled for teaching rather than performing and endlessly regrets it; his ex-girlfriend Ramona, a hacker turned Google employee who can't find a reason to use her skills; and Eason, one of Sevi's students, who's tugged into drug-running by his cousin. Their angst gains an external focus when, on New Year's Day 2012, SETI announces the discovery of an intentional radio signal emanating from the distant planet Omni-7xc. The focus could as easily have been the Occupy movement or the Syrian war, two among many big-issue cameos, but it all ends up just fodder for the characters' internal churn. The signal eventually stops, and neither characters nor reader care much. The lone truly science fictional narrator, astronaut He Zhen, develops a distinct perspective on the meaninglessness, but she's removed from the others by culture and light years, so what insight she gains is as drearily empty as all the rest. Sci-fi fans can skip this one.
