Homebound
A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • In this novel of friendship and hard-won hope, four lives are entangled across time by one story, saved to a floppy disk in the 1980s and destined to ripple across the centuries.
“A joy...and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human. It kept me up all night!” —MADELINE MILLER, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Song of Achilles
"A big, bold, ecstatic world—full of heart and wonder.” —RUTH OZEKI, New York Times bestselling author of A Tale for the Time Being
It’s 1983 and Becks can’t wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. She’s nineteen, blasting her Walkman, and hiding from the fact that her beloved uncle, the only person who understood her, is dead. But she has work to do: he left her a half-finished game to complete—one last collaboration to find her way out of loneliness.
Little does she know, what Becks is making will echo far into the future and shape the lives of a scientist, a sentient automaton, and a flinty sea captain in ways she cannot imagine. All are bound together by their search for connection—and by a futuristic traveler on a mysterious mission through space.
A novel about our deep interconnectedness, Homebound is a clear-eyed, hopeful adventure into humanity’s future and capacity for love.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This ambitious science fiction debut is a hopeful, intimate story about loss and connection. In 1983 Cincinnati, 19-year-old Becks is grieving the uncle who understood her best and struggling to finish the half-written text adventure game he left behind—a small act of devotion that ends up echoing for centuries. In the near future, a bioscientist confronting climate collapse is inspired by Becks’ game to help create Chaya, a sentient robot searching for purpose in a vast universe. Centuries after that, in a flooded world of scavengers and smugglers, the aging sea captain Yesiko crosses oceans aboard her ship Babylon with Chaya on board. Author Portia Elan pilots this complex, mixed-media story with remarkable confidence, moving between first-person memories, emails, game playthroughs, and far-future adventure. It’s vividly inventive speculative fiction with an emotional core about how stories keep us alive. The full-cast narration adds to the immersive feel and helps to keep the various strands distinct. Even the robot in this tale feels heartbreakingly human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elan's magnificent debut traces the reverberations of a computer game on the work of late-21st-century ecologists and seafaring migrants in the distant future. In 1983, college student Becks grieves the loss of Ben, her computer programmer uncle who died of AIDS. As she digs through Ben's possessions in her grandmother's house, she uncovers an unfinished video game, Homebound, that he left for her, and she sets out to complete it, reveling in the material language of computer programming ("Words between people... is like a glaze over the realness of action and being.... But code is the doing, is the thing: words and syntax and rules creating their own world"). In 2086, UC Berkeley professor Tamar Portman, who inherited a copy of Homebound from her late mentor, makes the startling discovery that Chaya, a robot she built to study ecosystems damaged by climate change, has become sentient. Later, Tamar and Chaya play the game together, in which an astronaut is lost in space. In a third thread, Chaya sails north in 2586 with a group to a site where they believe a time-traveling spaceman will return to Earth. Elan intersperses the sprawling epic with fascinating ontological discussions on the nature of life ("You are a part of our collective intelligence, part of the great spiral of being," Tamar tells Chaya). It's a marvel.
