For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new voice.
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.
Once unleashed, the Arctic Plague will reshape life on earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resiliency of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.
A friend suggested this one to me, and it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. However, what this book is is a social commentary of society, set during a pandemic where euthanasia even becomes the norm, and “elegy hotels” among other new trends. This is a collection of short stories, that are all eventually quite tied together, which was a neat exploration of a dystopian world.
How High We Go in the Dark is a sci-fi novel that takes place in a world ravaged by a deadly virus from the past. The world quickly falls apart, and the limits of humanity are really stretched to the absolute thinnest. Taking place as a collection of short stories, we get the POV of many different people on Earth as they navigate the world breaking apart, including finally a journey into deep space in search of a livable world.
The characters were definitely a strong point of this book. And the way the characters are tied together, despite how many of them they are, it’s surprisingly not too difficult to keep track of all of them. A lot of characters are explored quite deeply even within the short story allocation they have, and I felt that overall this was well done. When the characters were more and more tied together through each sequential short story, I also felt that this was well done, and really gave a general sense of continuity through the stories.
Unfortunately, I felt that the plot could be a little bit weak at times. I suppose this story really is much more about the people and how they deal with the pandemic and the world completely falling apart. That being said though, the order of the timeline of the stories was not something I fully expected, and I found it confusing at moments when I was wondering where and when I was. To me it wasn’t super clear, but perhaps it was clearer to other readers. There was also a big climax at some point which resolved wonderfully, and I felt like the whole book could basically have ended there…but it didn’t. The final short stories after that point felt like it dragged on for me, since I feel like everything was already set and given at that point, and the rest was just to explain some gaps.
The book certainly has interesting views and insights onto what happens when the. very seams of society are torn apart by something out of their control, not unlike our own real-life pandemic, just even worse. I certainly enjoyed some of the commentary, and also imagined what I would do given the same situation. Though there were many extra elements of sci-fi and “extended science” that I couldn’t quite get behind just given my own knowledge of science. Taking all those with a grain of salt though, it was interesting what sort of ethical and moral dilemmas come up when faced with difficult situations.
Overall Recommendations
How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of short stories, revolving around a world ravaged by an ancient virus that becomes nigh unstoppable. Taking place through many different perspectives, characters of all sorts of different lives come to grapple and deal with the effects of a pandemic that the world never recovers from. Certainly haunting and chilling at some points, there are also elements of hope and humanity that can never be extinguished. Overall it is a journey through time, of recovery and desperation, and what mankind pushed to its very limits can be seen to do.
Down the Rabbit Hole 