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Six novels feature characters who hunger for connection so strongly that they transform their environments. Credit.Ryan Gillett May 27, 2021, 9:55 a.m. ET Assembling columns is often an exercise in serendipity. For this one, I looked for works I thought would be wildly different from one another: a collection of short stories in translation, a debut about a single consciousness in multiple bodies, a young-adult techno-thriller, an Antarctic ghost story. But I was surprised to find, as I read my way through them, that they explored similar themes: adoption and child-rearing, intergenerational traumas, and characters who hunger for connection, communion and belonging so powerfully that they transform their environments, on scales ranging from the municipal to the cosmic. ....
This debut novel by Elly Bangs rockets out of the starting gate with the high-powered energy of such nth-gen cyberpunk as Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, before settling down towards its climax into a (comparatively) meditative ramble on identity, kinship, communication, and individual responsibility for the survival of the species. Along the way, there’s seldom a dull moment although the success or failure of one certain authorial maneuver (a particular tactic I’ve often employed myself in my own fiction) could be the subject of aesthetic debate. We open in the year 2159, at a time when the surface of the Earth has been ravaged by climate change and is an unstable wasteland, subject to super-storms and other phenomena. Most of the flourishing remnants of civilization are found in underwater arcologies of a sort. One such is Bloom City, run by a clan named the Medusas. Here live the three folks who will become central to our tale: a woman named Danae, who feat ....