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A Novel
by Portia Elan
Book Reviewed by:Five interlocking lives. One beloved story. A dazzling adventure across centuries and continents in search of the things that hold us together.
It's 1983 and Becks can't wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. She's nineteen, blasting her Walkman, and hiding from the fact that her beloved uncle, the only person who understood her, is dead. But she has work to do: he left her a half-finished game to complete—one last collaboration to find her way out of loneliness.
Little does she know, what Becks is making will echo far into the future and shape the lives of a scientist, a sentient automaton, and a flinty sea captain in ways she cannot imagine. All are bound together by their search for connection—and by a futuristic traveler on a mysterious mission through space.
A novel about our deep interconnectedness, Homebound is a clear-eyed, hopeful adventure into humanity's future and capacity for love.
CHAPTER 1
1983, SPRING
CINCINNATI
I love the way a computer program doesn't just describe something: it is the thing.
Words between people—normal language—is like a glaze over the realness of action and being. A bubble, not something you can touch or count on. But code is the doing, is the thing: words and syntax and rules creating their own world, their own existence. Everything the code needs is there, inside the computer.
I tap this semester's passkey into the door on Baldwin Lab. I get access to the lab because I'm taking freshman Computer Syntax 101, although it's a bullshit class; I could do most of the assignments in my sleep. This is where I come, though, when I don't want to go home and face Sheila the Mother, or when Veronica is busy with Jack.
Down the hallway, there's a grody water cooler, and then the lab, with its twenty Apple IIs and ten terminals hooked into the MUD, a broken clock, no windows, and three rules:
1. No food or drink
2. Save it to a floppy because it ...
This depth of character is a strong element of Elan's writing; another compelling quality is the variety of forms and styles she employs for the various characters... I won't spoil how the reader gets to see the story of Lieutenant California Solo, a mysterious heroine whose rescue mission in outer space connects the rest of the stories, but suffice to say that Solo's narration was my favorite part of the book, in no small part due to Elan's unique style of presenting Solo's story...continued
Full Review
(772 words)
(Reviewed by Maria Katsulos).
Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Book of Love
What a pleasure it was to read this book. Homebound's radiant heart and the sure-footed clarity of Elan's prose seduced me from the first page. It's the kind of scope and pleasure that, forgive me for using the shorthand of comparison, reminds me of the novels of Emily St. John Mandel and Daniel Mason. Ruth Ozeki, New York Times bestselling author of A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness
Homebound is a big, bold, ecstatic world—full of heart and wonder—where stories weave through time to connect us, and our faith in each other makes us human.
In Portia Elan's debut novel Homebound, protagonist Becks and her late uncle share a love of coding computer games, and because Becks's story takes place in 1983, these look pretty different from the video games we know today. Known as teletype games, these early computer games involved no graphics; instead, they were more like a conversation between computer and player, in which the player would type certain cues to prompt the next step in the game. The first adventure game, which inspired many that would follow—including Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—was Colossal Cave Adventure, released in 1976 by Will Crowther.
Colossal Cave Adventure (known colloquially as just Adventure) allows the player to explore...
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