At the top, I can feel my body wanting to shoot upward into the black sky, as if a puppet master is pulling on marionette strings. Two hands grasp my ankles as I nearly lose my balance. But even at this height, the force is not enough to fully lift me. I unwrap the infant from the jacket and hold them tight to my chest. Breathe in the smell of innocence and youth.
More a collection of related short stories than a traditional “novel”, How High We Go in the Dark explores many cool sci-fi ideas as people in our near future attempt to deal with climate change and the attendant release of a deadly virus as the Siberian permafrost begins to melt. The jumpy format, however, doesn’t really allow for the ideas — or the characters — to fully develop (to my satisfaction, anyway), and as author Sequoia Nagamatsu is Japanese-American, this is, at its core, an examination of the pressures (to succeed, to honour family, etc) within his culture that could have been set anywhere/anywhen. I was entertained throughout, eager to see how Nagamatsu would pull it all together, but this won’t stay with me.
Maksim assured me the quarantine was precautionary since the team had successfully reanimated viruses and bacteria in the melting permafrost. He said government officials watch too many movies. Standard protocol. No one at the outpost seemed sick or concerned.
The story begins in 2030 with an archaeologist arriving at his recently deceased daughter’s remote worksite, where he hopes to understand what compelling mysteries were keeping her from returning to her home and young daughter back in the States. As he reads her journals and examines the fascinating burial site of a Neanderthal girl (whose presence was uncovered by the melting permafrost and resulting sinkholes that are currently appearing in the Russian north), Cliff will feel closer to his daughter, even as the virus the dig has unleashed begins to take a devastating toll on people — and especially children — around the world.
“Have you heard of a euthanasia park?” he asked. It was early in the morning. I was pulling on my janitorial coveralls. I paused. Of course I had.
The next chapter begins with a young man (an aspiring comedian who needs to take odd jobs in this near future of empty nightclubs, unemployment, and widespread homelessness) who gets hired as a mascot at The City of Laughter: a theme park built on the site of a former penitentiary, where terminal children can go to have their last, best day. Each chapter that follows focuses on someone who works a new job in this new, bleak reality — a concierge at an elegy hotel (“We were just glorified bellhops for the mountains of Arctic plague victims awaiting cremation, for the families who wanted to curl up in a suite beside the corpses of their loved ones and heal”), a forensic pathologist studying the decay of plague victims on a “body farm”, an artist who lands a berth on a spaceship leaving Earth in search of a new planet — and death is so prevalent in this new world that the mortuary business has taken over the banks, with people paid in funerary tokens (“mortuary cryptocurrencies tied to ad-ridden phone apps”) and empty apartment towers are turned into high tech columbaria for the storage of millions of urns. And throughout, the main character in each story is a Japanese-American, who sounds the same no matter their sex or age, and who is somehow estranged from their family. Characters interweave throughout the stories — the artist who leaves on the spaceship is married to the archaeologist in the first story; one of her paintings hangs on the wall of the girlfriend of the elegy hotel concierge, etc — and there’s a mysterious something (hinted at in my opening quote) overhanging everything that threatens our basic understanding of reality.
Lieutenant Johansson, the navigation officer, was telling me there’s an invisible web that ties the stars and planets and galaxies together. We don’t know what it is or how it works, but it’s out there, all around us.
In the first story, the archaeologist remembers how his daughter had a “UFO stage” and dragged him to a Bigfoot convention and liked to watch Ancient Aliens, and here’s the thing, I like to watch Ancient Aliens, too. I like hearing the stories of ancient mythologies from around the world and watch as people explore those sites today; and when each episode inevitably leads to a wacky conclusion, I can turn my brain off and still feel like I had enjoyed the journey, if not followed all the way to the destination. And Nagamatsu gives us the same sort of format here: there’s a bunch of interesting stories that describe a new future world, and then the final chapter ties it all together, wackily. And you can either enjoy the journey and be wowed by the destination, or, like me, appreciate elements of the journey and turn your brain off as you reach the end. This wasn’t a waste of my time, but it wasn’t much more than a time-waster for me.
