I’m a sucker for metafiction that incorporates footnotes and faux academic rhetoric, so when I first heard about Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms, I knew I needed to check it out. Metallic Realms follows Michael Lincoln (ha!), a wannabe writer, devoted sci-fi fan, and striving critic as he both witnesses the creation of and composes the critical analysis regarding the eponymous Metallic Realms stories, written by a writing collective of four aspiring authors calling themselves the Orb 4. But all is not well in the creative paradise of Brooklyn, NY. While Michael styles himself as a kind of relaxed version of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, there’s a dark undercurrent running through his perspective of the events that lead to the ultimate dissolution of the collective, a bit like Merrikat from We Have Always Live in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. Pretty quickly one begins to question Mike’s recollection of things.
The Orb 4—composed of Taras, Darya, Jane, and Merlin—are not always likeable characters, but they are engaging. Mixed together, they generate the exact kind of drama-chemistry that makes it entirely too enjoyable to watch them clash and squabble. Portraits of these complex relationships are woven into Mike’s critical analyses of the selection of “canonical” short stories that create The Metallic Realms universe, along with presentations of the stories themselves. While the insertion of mediocre stories could have slowed down the narrative flow, instead they highlight Mike’s outsized adoration of them and provide a speculative-warped glimpse into the mindset of the collective towards each other and towards the world at large, as the Orb 4 are almost pathologically Millennial: disillusioned, cynical, and broke.
Yet through it all, you can feel author Lincoln Michel’s affection for the genre and its diehard fans, as well as his sympathy for each of the collective’s members, struggling to find their place in publishing, fandom, and life in general. It’s also a funny book, and more than once I caught myself barking in laughter at some witty observation about the creative world in which I, too, live. It’s a swift, fun read that will leave you thinking about a lot more than just what it takes to be a creative in this current environment.
This book is for you if:
- you enjoy fictional footnotes and faux academic criticism.
- you’re a bit of a cynical gossip who loves a juicy tidbit about your colleagues.
- you’re an aspiring author of speculative fiction and are wondering if you’ll ever “break in.”
- you’ve ever wondered what people say about you when they think you aren’t listening.
- you’ve ever struggled with friend groups and found them complicated to navigate.
- you enjoy an unreliable narrator.
- you enjoy books about creatives in New York City.
I’m delighted to have had a chance to talk to Lincoln Michel about Metallic Realms!
1) First, I just want to thank you for taking the time to participate in this interview. I really enjoyed Metallic Realms, especially it’s mix of darkness and humor. I also enjoyed the footnotes (even if Taras hates them!). Michael Lincoln (literary doppelgänger?) has such a unique voice and perspective, so I was curious: which came first? The Metallic Realms or Mike?
Thanks for taking the time to read and to ask me questions! Technically, the Metallic Realms came first. I wrote and published a version of “The Duchy of the Toe Adam” in Terraform some years ago. That led me to start writing more gonzo space opera stories in that universe for my own amusement while working on other things, including my first novel, The Body Scout. Mike came later. As a reader, I’ve always been a fan of buffoonish, delusional, and somewhat sad narrators (e.g., Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire). I know a lot of readers dislike such characters in our “everyone should be likeable!” age. But I love them. Which is just to say that a Michael-type narrator is one I’ve always wanted to write. But he came after in this case.
The third idea that combined the Metallic Realms and Mike is that I’ve long had an idea for an Oulipian sort of novel structured as an anthology of short stories from a writing collective where the plot of the group’s in-fighting and dissolution would be unveiled entirely in their autofiction stories. In my original idea, it would have been just stories. No central narrator. I still like this idea and its formal challenges. But I never found a way in. When I started writing those gonzo space opera stories, I had no idea how to make them a book. Then I realized they could be the basis for the writing group novel and the main narrative could be carried by the Charles Kinbotesque narrator I’d always wanted to write. That was more or less the order of things.
2) One of the things I really enjoyed were the myriad easter eggs you hid in the text, little references to various fandoms from Star Trek to Lord of the Rings to Arthur C. Clarke (Caique!) and Golden Age Sci-Fi, and a lot more. It’s obvious throughout the text that although there’s some gentle ribbing at various fandoms, you come from a place of deep love for the genre. What are one or two of your favorite fandoms, or what fandoms do you feel have especially shaped you and your work?
I’m definitely someone who grew up reading and loving science fiction and so-called “genre fiction” in general. I never bought into the “literary vs. genre” divide, honestly. Part of that is because the “literary” authors I loved the most were surrealists, magical realists, or postmodern types who were SFF-adjacent to begin with. I didn’t think Vonnegut and Le Guin were qualitatively different than Calvino and Marquez (to pick a few favorites from my teenage years). I’ve always been a fan. Fandom is a different question. I’m old enough that I remember when internet access (and internet content) was limited. I grew up in a rural area outside of a small city. My fandom was a mostly solo endeavor. As a child, I poured over old Warhammer catalogs and got wrapped up in the mythology and universes of Final Fantasy or X Files or The Next Generation. I loved how SFF worlds had all these gaps you could expand your own imagination into. Now, it feels codified. Closed. I preferred imagining what “the clone wars” or the histories of background bounty hunter characters in Star Wars—or debating these things with a few close friends—rather than just looking up “the answer” on Wookipedia. Or getting a million prequels and sequels explaining every single thing. It drains some of the magic, for me.
3) I’m a sucker for faux academia narratives, and Metallic Realms does this so well by alternating between Mike’s academic scholarship regarding various Metallic Realm stories, as well as including the actually Orb 4 short stories. I’ve got to ask: do you have a favorite Orb 4 story, and why does it hold a special delight for you?
My favorite story might be a space horror one that we had to cut because it was simply too long. It disrupted the narrative flow. I’ll figure out something to do with it—a little supplemental zine maybe? Outside of that lost story, I have to say “Toe Adam.” It was the first one I wrote and the whole vibe and characters and everything spill out of that one.
4) What did you feel was the most challenging part of writing Metallic Realms? What gave you the most difficulty, and how did you overcome that? Was the challenge something you often struggle with in any work, or did Metallic Realms present its own unique difficulty in any way?
The hardest part was the kind of Rube Goldberg machine structure that meant any changes I made required a cascading series of other revisions through both the “real world” stories and the Metallic Realms stories. For example, the writing collective originally had five members and cutting that fifth member—plus his Metallic Realms stand-in alien character—meant a lot of rewriting. I’m not sure how it was overcome except a lot of rereading to check for introduced errors and a lot of new writing. (Several Star Rot Chronicles stories were jettisoned and replaced from scratch with new stories during revision.)
I remember a professor telling me that writing a novel is just giving yourself a series of problems to solve. So, this is also just the nature of the beast I suppose. But the number of core characters and the dual real-world and SFF storylines made this aspect tricky for me.
5) I know one of the things I’ll be taking away from Metallic Realms is the joy of fandom you present in the text, but I also think often on the social dramas between the various Orb 4 members, their petty jealousies and the struggles they face in an increasingly challenging art landscape. What do you hope readers will take away from Metallic Realms?
I favor the idea that readers can take their own meaning from art. But one thing I hope readers find is that the book is fun while still being meaningful. I mentioned above being a lover of authors like Calvino, Le Guin, and Marquez growing up, and I think those (and similar) authors made me realize that literature was, yes, serious and meaningful and an exploration of important themes… but also it is fun and weird and experimental and often quite funny. I think we’ve lost a bit of the playful, puckish spirit in American fiction in recent years. I’m hoping the pendulum is swinging back around.
6) On a semi-unrelated note, as an avid reader myself, I always love to ask authors I interview what books or films have really spoken to them. Do you have any reading or film recommendations that you think everyone should check out?
Like every artist, I get endless inspiration from other art. Movies, museums, video games, anything. In terms of Metallic Realms specifically, there are homages to Italo Calvino (especially Invisible Cities but also Cosmicomics), Ursula K. Le Guin (specifically “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” but also the Hainish Cycle), Star Trek: The Next Generation, Vladimir Nabokov (especially Pale Fire), and more. I was also inspired by reading Percival Everett’s Erasure in grad school. That’s a brilliant book in many ways, but I especially admired the audacity of including a fictional novella within the novel. The footnotes, that you nicely mentioned above, were inspired by Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and probably Infinite Jest. Octavia Butler, Jack Kirby’s cosmic comics, The Twilight Zone, Brazil, Gene Wolfe… I could go on and on.
I realize that is kind of a sideways answer. But those are some inspirations, and I’d certainly recommend them.
7) Last, but not least, what’s next for you, if you can say? Are you working on a new novel? What should readers who love the Metallic Realms keep their eyes open for next?
I’m always a bit scattered and working on too many projects at once. That said, I am deep into a draft of what I think will be my next novel. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ll say it is a haunted house horror novel (although, I hope, funny too).
Lincoln Michel’s debut novel, The Body Scout (Orbit), 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. He is also the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and co-editor of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult). His work appears in The Paris Review, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Granta, and Lightspeed. His second novel, Metallic Realms, was published by Atria Books this May. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and his newsletter Counter Craft.