Editorial Content for Homebound

Spanning six centuries, countless lives, and generations of progress and decline, debut novelist Portia Elan’s HOMEBOUND is a life-affirming, genre-smashing, cli-fi drama.

The year is 1983, and Rebecca --- Becks, to those who know her --- is grieving her beloved uncle, who educated her in computer programming languages from the time she was a young girl and offered her a way out of her boring, controlled Cincinnati life. When we meet Becks, she is only 19, and it is the start of the summer she was supposed to be spending across the country in Cambridge, designing games with her uncle and enjoying the freedom of her youth. Instead, after months of estrangement, he has died of GRID (“Gay-Related Immune Disease”).

Becks is left adrift, with nothing but one of her uncle’s half-finished games to sustain her and help her navigate the changing world around her, her complicated feelings for her best friend, and the technology boom that seems to be just on the horizon. A devotee to the language of code, she begins to finish his final game, Homebound, in an attempt to suss out the reality of his life and what it means for her own ability to find her place in the world.

About a hundred years later, in 2078, the technology boom that Becks so craved has come to fruition --- and with it, power-hungry CEOs, artificial intelligence, and the drying up of the planet’s water. For years, inventors have been charged with finding the magic code that would cool global warming, revive the oceans, cure cancer, solve hunger, and --- most important of all --- make money. It is here and under these constraints that we meet Dr. Tamar Portman, who feels that science is pointing not at trendy fast fixes, but at a deeper understanding of systems: those of plants, fungi, bacteria and animals, and how they adapt to change and develop resilience.

"HOMEBOUND is easily comparable to CLOUD ATLAS or TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW. But thanks to Elan’s unique structure, it presents itself as something totally its own, with a hidden puzzle that readers will delight in unveiling and reassembling for themselves."

Building off of this hypothesis, Becks creates Ayes, sentient robots who will wander through forests planting saplings and filtering polluted water sources. With brains that think in systems rather than specificity, the Ayes as Dr. Portman envisions them are capable of adopting a holistic approach to Earth and seeing the links and relations in ecosystems more clearly than their human counterparts. So, naturally, thanks to a wealthy investor, an iron-clad NDA, and sheer human greed, they become robot servants. Before long, there is an Aye to gather crops, an Aye to assemble machinery, an Aye to slaughter livestock, and even whole armies of them used to fight human wars. Like the computer, the iPhone and any other once-unbelievable invention, the Ayes become so commonplace that people forget their original intent: to heal.

Finally, some 600 years later, centuries since Becks blasted her Walkman as she learned to code, Earth has fallen victim not just to climate change, but to climate disaster. The planet has drowned, old technologies have been forgotten, and entire nations fall victim to “hum,” a drug that sends its user into an addled stupor, so removed from reality that they forget to be angry at what the elite have done. It is here that we meet Yesiko, a plucky captain who navigates her ship, the Babylon, through rough waters, regular earthquakes, and the figurative noose around her neck in the form of a debt tattoo. That is the cost she paid to save the life of her only shipmate, Root, now plugged into expensive technology that ties him to the ship and prevents Yesiko from defaulting on her debt.

When an unlikely trio --- two siblings and an unusually sentient Aye, Chaya --- secure passage on Yesiko’s ship, it seems that her debt will be paid and she and Root finally will be free to travel the world and ravage sunken ships in search of treasure, gathering stories from everyone they meet along the way. And then the siblings and Chaya reveal the true motive behind their trip north: the myth of a rebel spaceship captain and a lone girl with an earth-shattering secret.

In Chaya’s telling, all of the world’s remaining Ayes are pre-programmed with an origin story of sorts, “written into our memory in the earliest days of our existence.” In it, a lone spaceship captain discovers a frozen ship full of sleeping passengers, stuck in time and lost in space. When she goes off course in search of answers, she discovers a planet and a girl named Elijah, who shows the astronaut a strange device, “a doorway, a choice, a passage.” What lies beyond the portal, Elijah tells her, will not only free the frozen ship but awaken its passengers and change the astronaut’s life forever. Elijah’s promise does indeed come true, but with it, Elijah and the astronaut are lost to space. Now, Chaya tells Yesiko and Root, calculations have shown that Elijah and the astronaut are due to return to Earth in only seven weeks. And with them will come the answers that may save humanity.

So how in the world will these three women find their lives intertwined? The answer spans centuries, planets and generations, yet it’s very simple in the end: by championing love and interconnectedness. Portia Elan employs an epistolary format that whisks her readers through unsent emails, news articles, ship logs and expansive storytelling to ask what we owe each other, and what we carry with us when we love and lose.

An unexpectedly moving and surprisingly whimsical depiction of found families, queer love, technological advances, and, of course, climate change, HOMEBOUND is easily comparable to CLOUD ATLAS or TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW. But thanks to Elan’s unique structure, it presents itself as something totally its own, with a hidden puzzle that readers will delight in unveiling and reassembling for themselves. It’s an ambitious novel in scope, but it balances its more far-reaching qualities with a deep commitment to human lives and stories, turning an out-of-this-world story into something that feels as intimate and cozy as a warm hug. Through these more personal moments, Elan is able to ponder deep, thought-provoking questions about loneliness and belonging while championing the need for interconnectedness and community. It is through our stories that we survive, even when they feel like ghosts or baggage.

Some may struggle with Elan’s unusual style --- especially when it means juggling wildly different timelines and characters with no immediately obvious ties --- but, as with most innovations, the end result is more than worth the wait. By the time you’ve gotten your bearings in each timeline and with each character, Elan already has begun tying them together and building the borders of her expansive, vivid puzzle. Now all you have to do is place the final piece.

HOMEBOUND is an ingenious marvel that will remind you why we must continue to care about ourselves, each other and our planet while we still can.