Book review: Sequoia Nagamatsu's debut sci-fi novel 'How High We Go in the Dark' is a bleak cautionary tale that ponders the present through a future lens
Kim Stanley Robinson, one of our best living science fiction writers, has compared science fiction to a pair of old-fashioned 3-D glasses; through one lens we see predictions about the future, through the other we recognize metaphors for our own time, and with the two together we get to feel ourselves participating in history. “How High We Go in the Dark,” the debut novel by Sequoia Nagamatsu, a young Japanese-American, presents exactly this kind of complex vision.
A similarly creepy story features a worker in an “elegy hotel,” where families rent fancy rooms to lie with their dying loved ones and then receive full-service funeral and cremation “packages.” The hardened narrator here hangs out on the hotel fire escape, smoking pot and counting “the tiny explosions from the welders attaching wind turbines that looked like gigantic tulips across the otherwise dark Financial District.
Some of the stories take place in the United States, some in Japan, some in less-specific locations, and one in a heaven-like place, where a character named Jun is climbing a sort of pyramid with a group of others, also recently dead from the plague and discovering “planets of memory.” “All around us, spheres of iridescent light the size of hot-air balloons descend like a school of jellyfish.
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