“I believe in what science fiction can do, which is it can set up simple rules that it has to follow to try to illuminate something about the present that is somewhat invisible to us. Except that, even in that illumination, you have to admit that you just don’t know—that some things are a capital M mystery that are beyond our five senses, and that we couldn’t possibly perceive or articulate.”
– Brit Marling on the making of The OA
From the very first pages of Under Story, I felt this tingling. I felt this strange sense of déjà vu (very à propos here). Where have I experienced this unabashed world-building before, this teenage bursting-at-the-seams exuberance, this intoxicating mixture of science fiction, zaniness, love story, climate literature and coming/reversing of age story?
The OA. Solaris. Stranger Things. Great Circle. Wild Dark Shore. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Cloud Atlas. The Double Life of Veronique. Station Eleven. The OA, again.
Sometimes, a writer sits patiently in the stillness and a news article sparks their imagination. They feel the heat rising. They catch on fire.
In 2020, Chloe Benjamin came across the story of NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a cosmic particle detector in Antarctica, that had recently observed a series of unusual radio signals which appeared to be coming from below the horizon, in a manner that could not be explained.
She crossed the Rubicon.
This novel is a little mad, sprawling and messy. It is cinematic in scope and rooted in details. It is brimming with real science and off the wall in its flights of fancy. It is neuroplasticity incarnate.
It made me question what it means to be a human living in time. It made me do mathematical calculations in my bed in the middle of the night.
It made me go look up at the sky and touch a few trees.
It made me gasp at pictures of the neutrino detector Super-Kamiokande in Japan. Go ahead, Google it.
It made me hug my son a little bit tighter.
Unhinged, profound, wacky and philosophical, Under Story wears its huge fantastical heart on its sleeve. With no apologies.
And I loved it all the more for it.
