Excerpt from An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

BRING ON THE DANCING HORSES

When I call my parents, my mom tells me my dad is busy teaching a class on the internet. That is, the class is in a classroom but the topic is the internet. More specifically, he's teaching seniors—that is, old people—how to blog, write anonymous comments on news articles without panicking, poke their children on Facebook, and get away with not writing h, t, t, p, colon, forward slash, forward slash, w, w, w, dot before every web address.

I had no idea my dad liked the internet so much. "Who said anything about like?" my mom says. I can hear her clicking away at her keyboard in the background.

My dad is retired—or was. Is it that they need the money? I fantasize about a heretofore unknown gambling problem, hush funds, love children. My mom sells my old comic books and De La Soul cassingles on eBay. She doesn't know I know. Every so often I'll think about stuff I loved in my youth, and a search inevitably brings up her dealer name.

I amp the bidding when it seems safe. You could say I'm looking out for her. But how is it that her four grown kids have neglected their parents' financial needs?

I go to bed with a nagging sense of guilt, though this is how I usually go to bed.

* * *

My girlfriend, Tabby, reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world.

She went to Penumbra College in Vermont and is ABD in comparative literature at Rue University. She's been ABD ever since we met, back when I didn't know what it stood for. Her dissertation is about one or possibly all of these things: manservant literature, robot literature, and the literature of deception.

Tabby is considerably older than me, and by considerably I mean over ten years. I told my parents five, but I don't think they believed me. Tabitha Grammaticus remembers not only life before the internet, but life before the affordable and relatively silent electric typewriter.

She reads fast, writes faster. She does monthly columns for the California Science Fiction Review, Exoplanets magazine, and the website for the Northwest Airlines' Frequent Flier Book Club, which is getting a soft launch.

* * *

I didn't think it was possible for someone to read as fast as Tabby does, and for a long time I assumed she was a skimmer. But whenever I'd quiz her on a novel that we'd both read, she knew every detail. I'd sit there with the book open and ask things like: "Who answers the door in the middle of chapter 7?"

I tried to keep up with Tabby's reviewing, but it's hard when someone's so prolific. I am not friends with many writers, mostly because that means having to read all their articles, stories, essays, books, and even poetry. They expect you to have read it all. With Tabby, I tried. I really did.

But she's what she calls a stylist. I gave up on her Exoplanets column after the third one. I got stuck on the opening line: "All time travel is essentially Oedipal."

Tabby is a brilliant genius in her own way, but sometimes I worry that she is turning into an alien. Lately we don't go out much, and she has taken to wearing what she calls a housecoat about the house. Whenever I'd come across the word "housecoat" in a brittle British novel of misaddressed correspondence and quiet adultery, I would try to picture what was meant. I was never sure, but surely it isn't this thing that Tabby more or less lives in, a sort of down-filled poncho with stirrups.

* * *

At the same time I'm attracted to this girl at work. I don't even want to know how old she is. My guess is that she's younger than me by a margin nearly as great as that separating me from Tabby. But what do I know about age? I thought Tabby was my age when I met her. I'm not a good judge of these things, possibly of anything.

Excerpted from An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park. Copyright © 2025 by Ed Park. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.