Homebound (Scribner, May), the intricate debut novel by Portia Elan, addresses contemporary concerns while indulging in nostalgia for the early days of computer gaming. Elan has always liked “multi-POV, multi-timeline” stories because of their resemblance to choice-based narrative computer games. Her novel, which features one such game, requires “some leaping work to understand,” she says, in reference to its myriad voices.
A bit of limbering up might be necessary for the following summary of Homebound, not to mention the novel itself. It begins in 1983 Berkeley, Calif., as queer teenager Becks works to complete an unfinished computer game written by her recently deceased uncle in which the player investigates an unresponsive spacecraft. The timeline then darts to the near future, where a UC Berkeley scientist heads up a public-private enterprise to develop a new generation of ambulatory robots, or AmAyes, to repair ecosystems disrupted by climate change. From there, the narrative extends to the watery, postapocalyptic 2500s, when salvagers aboard the Babylon agree to sail a group of passengers, including an AmAye named Chaya, to the site where they believe a long-absent spaceship will return. The computer game is at the crux of Homebound’s narrative, which comprises emails, game logs, and Chaya’s “folkloric” narration, which Elan says is meant to “pull us through time.”
Raised in the Bay Area, Elan attended a “tiny little hippie school” in Menlo Park whose free-spirited ethos set her on a varied educational path. She studied medieval history—“I read a Michael Crichton novel set in the medieval period at a critical time in my life,” she explains—and then attained a library sciences degree from the University of Illinois, where she also studied poetry. She went on to earn her MFA at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, then taught high school English and history in the Bay Area before taking a job as a public librarian.
The daughter of an avid programmer, Elan has also devised several games using the open-source Twine software, which gave her an appreciation for coding as a “creative endeavor.” That insight is at the heart of Homebound, in which a piece of code tells a story that reverberates across centuries.
