Metallic Realms
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 13, 2025
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Fantastic universes and personal dramas collide as a group of friends blur the line between real life and fiction with delightfully disastrous results from the acclaimed author of the “timeless and original” (The New York Times) The Body Scout.
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 These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now.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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Michel (The Body Scout) spins a riveting tale of a sci-fi writing group and its obsessive hanger-on, Michael Lincoln. Borrowing the arch tone and annotated book-within-a-book form of Pale Fire, the novel consists of a collection of stories written by the group and edited by Michael with extensive notes and digressive passages about the writers' interrelationships and Michael's own tenuous connection to them. The group, called the Orb 4, includes Taras K. Castle, a talented author with whom Michael grew up in Vermont, and who shares an apartment with Michael in Brooklyn; their other roommate, Castel Ocampo, a queer and nonbinary writer who uses the pen name Merlin; Jane Noh Johnson, whose "dual nature" explains her enrollment in an MFA program where she churns out "dreary literary realism" when she's not writing exciting "escapades" for the group; and Darya Azali, the group's "loud and proud geek." Michel has a knack for exploring the characters' complex relationships, as Michael's delusional view of himself and the world around him careens toward its breaking point while the Orb 4's stories bleed into the writers' real lives . This captivates.
