Homebound : a novel / Portia Elan.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK * In this novel of friendship and hard-won hope, four lives are entangled across time by one story, saved to a floppy disk in the 1980s and destined to ripple across the centuries.

"A joy...and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human. It kept me up all night!" --MADELINE MILLER, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Song of Achilles

"A big, bold, ecstatic world--full of heart and wonder."--RUTH OZEKI, New York Times bestselling author of A Tale for the Time Being

It's 1983 and Becks can't wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. She's nineteen, blasting her Walkman, and hiding from the fact that her beloved uncle, the only person who understood her, is dead. But she has work to do: he left her a half-finished game to complete--one last collaboration to find her way out of loneliness.

Little does she know, what Becks is making will echo far into the future and shape the lives of a scientist, a sentient automaton, and a flinty sea captain in ways she cannot imagine. All are bound together by their search for connection--and by a futuristic traveler on a mysterious mission through space.

A novel about our deep interconnectedness, Homebound is a clear-eyed, hopeful adventure into humanity's future and capacity for love.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 1983, SPRING CINCINNATI I love the way a computer program doesn't just describe something: it is the thing. Words between people--normal language--is like a glaze over the realness of action and being. A bubble, not something you can touch or count on. But code is the doing, is the thing: words and syntax and rules creating their own world, their own existence. Everything the code needs is there, inside the computer. I tap this semester's passkey into the door on Baldwin Lab. I get access to the lab because I'm taking freshman Computer Syntax 101, although it's a bullshit class; I could do most of the assignments in my sleep. This is where I come, though, when I don't want to go home and face Sheila the Mother, or when Veronica is busy with Jack. Down the hallway, there's a grody water cooler, and then the lab, with its twenty Apple IIs and ten terminals hooked into the MUD, a broken clock, no windows, and three rules: 1. No food or drink 2. Save it to a floppy because it will get deleted 3. Don't touch anyone else's keyboard The TA on duty doesn't care if I work on personal projects, or if I listen to my Walkman with Television or the Clash turned up to eighteen. The glow of the monitor screen washes without judgment over my ripped jeans, my band T-shirts, my dyed-black hair. It feels like freedom. When I told you, on our weekly call sometime near the start of high school, that I was taking Computer Basics, you got so excited, thinking I was learning BASIC. Back then, I didn't even know what a programming language was. I sat there, coiling the phone cord around my fingers in Bubbe's kitchen, which was the only place I called you from, because of Sheila. You described the possibilities of machine learning, and it was like you were speaking to me not from the East Coast, but from somewhere else in time, from some other world. "You're going to love it," you said. "It's the language of the future." I never told you this, although I think you would have laughed: the next day, I stopped by the high school library to see if they had any books on BASIC. I wanted to close the gap between what you'd thought I was learning and the rudimentary typing lessons I was getting in class. The librarian gave me some issues of Creative Computing : I tried to memorize the most obvious commands--LET, PRINT, GOTO, IF--even as my mind tumbled through all the ones I didn't understand yet: DIM, CHR$, TIME versus TIME$. That same day after school, on a TRS-80 at the RadioShack downtown, I tried typing Valley Bomber , one of the programs printed on thin newsprint in the magazine's back pages. Command after command after command. It seems so improbable, so strange--that shapes rendered in ink-on-paper could become something else inside the computer, but they can. In the game, the player flew through a valley surrounded by mountains, dropping bombs in the narrow stretch between the heights. I thought, while I was typing it all in, that I wouldn't mind destroying some mountains. Just destroy it all, maybe. The game didn't work. I arrowed up through the lines of code, searching for what I'd done wrong, but the glowing letters swarmed opaquely, refusing to show me. After a week of typing the same sequence in over and over, I found the problem--I'd messed up something simple in the syntax. But I'd gotten a taste of something. I went back to RadioShack again and again to the code, tossing my backpack under the counter and avoiding eye contact with the salesmen so they wouldn't bother me. Once the screen booted up, I could be invisible for a while. Not a loner, not a disappointment of a daughter. Later that year, I would meet Veronica and she would make me less of a loner, even if I stayed a disappointment to Sheila. But when she and I weren't together, all I wanted to do was slip inside the programs like they were castles, made of logic rather than stones. With a Replacements tape blaring in my headphones, I taught myself to code from a copy of 100 BASIC Computer Games . That's the book the librarian found for me after I'd burned through all her issues of Creative Computing . And then, when you thought I was ready, you sent me a letter with the first part of a program, handwritten on a sheet of yellow legal paper. I understood the first few commands--naming the program, a REM line saying [This program will put the wind in your sails], but after that I got lost. What were the commands drawing on the screen? Impossible to tell from just the coordinates. I'd have to see them. The unfinished lines of code beckoned, an invitation to a new world where I was smart, I was important. You programmed real games in Cambridge, but you made time to write code with me. That first program: when we finished it, it drew a sailboat that disappeared into the horizon as the sun set. Here is one of the things you taught me: every program is like a conversation in which the programmer asks one question over and over again, "How do I make the code do X?" and the code answers, offers a cascade of answers. The result is a personal, intimate kind of logic, and although the code itself might look dry and alien, the choices embedded in it--the defining of variables, sequencing of commands, layering of functions--are like a map of the programmer's mind. But you didn't just teach me to make games, you taught me to love them, too. We worked through the rooms of Zork , each of us making our own grid paper map to mark the grues. We assembled ships in Pirate Adventure . We debated whether The Prisoner was a good game or just a good thought experiment. And now, almost exactly four years after I started that dumb freshman computer class, I know more than enough BASIC to write a program to calculate the number of days since you died: thirty-seven. The code I write doesn't have feelings and it doesn't care about mine. It either works or it doesn't. When typing it into the Apple II, I have to stay focused. The fact that you are dead, that you are not in the world anymore, is like a strong magnet held against a cassette. Data--feeling--flattened into irretrievable nothing. But in the code, there are rules and patterns I can rest against. I know where I've been and where I'm going. By the time I'm done today, it's almost time for the lab to close. I hit RUN. The TA on duty comes over. I slide my headphones off. "Bug in the code?" he asks. The expression came from a literal bug in a computer--that's the story you told me--a moth trapped in the electrical relays, pulled out by Grace Hopper and taped into a logbook with the annotation "First actual case of bug being found." A moth, pinioned in the relays, yielding only an error; whatever was intelligible, lost. Here and now, it would mean: I typed something in wrong, transposed characters or inverted syntax, or even missed a command entirely. I shrug. "Yeah." I hit delete and the program's text evaporates from the screen. "I'll try again later." I get up and go out into the blazing spring evening to take the bus home. I'm thinking about patience, and how, in order to have patience you have to have hope or faith, or some clear idea that it gets better. I'm thinking about all the games you'll never write, about the body of a moth pressed between relays, about lines of code that yield only "error," so you have to rewrite it, every line. You can't do that to a person: scroll through the logic and commands that make them who they are, rewrite the bugs. We run through life once, and when it's over--when you hit an error--it's just over, no one waiting to help you fix the mistakes. Excerpted from Homebound: A GMA Book Club Pick: a Novel by Portia Elan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

DEBUT Spanning epochs of time, a small group of characters orbit each other, all unknowingly connected to an early computer game called Homebound. This text adventure, which is played in the book, is an example of late-1970s experimental interactive fiction, a form of DIY writing that was collaborative, branching and hyperlinked, and supported by a devoted community of creators and reader-players. That ethos of storytelling infuses Elan's debut with much of its lovely, aching, wondering, and wandering sensibility. The diffuse story pivots around a teenage girl in the 1980s, coping with the death of her beloved uncle, and a ship captain in the late 2500s, trying to keep her tiny crew alive in a dystopian world that was long ago overrun with water. Connecting them is the game and its community of readers, including a scientist and the robot she has created. Across its long life, the robot carries the story forward like Homer, seeding it in new spaces with different experiences and understanding of stories. The magic of Elan's novel is the fact that as it unfolds, the story of Homebound the game is unfolding too, linking readers of Elan's book with the fictional readers within it. VERDICT Quiet, smoothly written, and deeply internal, this is a gift to readers who enjoy the act of story-creation, -telling, and -experiencing.--Neal Wyatt

Publishers Weekly Review

Elan's magnificent debut traces the reverberations of a computer game on the work of late-21st-century ecologists and seafaring migrants in the distant future. In 1983, college student Becks grieves the loss of Ben, her computer programmer uncle who died of AIDS. As she digs through Ben's possessions in her grandmother's house, she uncovers an unfinished video game, Homebound, that he left for her, and she sets out to complete it, reveling in the material language of computer programming ("Words between people... is like a glaze over the realness of action and being.... But code is the doing, is the thing: words and syntax and rules creating their own world"). In 2086, UC Berkeley professor Tamar Portman, who inherited a copy of Homebound from her late mentor, makes the startling discovery that Chaya, a robot she built to study ecosystems damaged by climate change, has become sentient. Later, Tamar and Chaya play the game together, in which an astronaut is lost in space. In a third thread, Chaya sails north in 2586 with a group to a site where they believe a time-traveling spaceman will return to Earth. Elan intersperses the sprawling epic with fascinating ontological discussions on the nature of life ("You are a part of our collective intelligence, part of the great spiral of being," Tamar tells Chaya). It's a marvel. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group. (May)

Booklist Review

In 1983, a lonely college student mourns the death of her beloved uncle, who she didn't even realize was sick. In 2586, after Earth has almost entirely flooded, a misanthropic ship captain tries to pay off a medical debt. In the late twenty-first century, a researcher studies a robot that seems aware of its existence. Finally, told through a branching, text-based game, an immunocompromised astronaut enters a portal that transports her to souls in need of guidance. How are these lives connected? You'll have to read this unusual first novel to find out, but suffice it to say that Elan deftly knots these threads together, gradually revealing layered stories about queer love and loss, making peace with one's mistakes, and finding a path through obstacles outside your control. Throughout, the characters ache from isolation while they labor to eke out longer, more fulfilling lives through medicine that should be freely available, communities that should be celebrated, not hidden, and stories that will outlive any one person. Like Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), Homebound portrays a plausible, forlorn version of the future, one that's tied to the past through the staying power of stories.

Kirkus Book Review

A computer game designed by a troubled young woman from Cincinnati becomes the unexpected link between her 1983 self, a robot, and people from a far-future Earth. Nineteen-year-old Becks loves computers; governed by a language and a logic she understands, they give her the invisibility she craves. Better still, they make her feel close to her Uncle Ben, a computer-game programmer who sometimes writes code with her. When Ben dies, he leaves Becks a half-finished game about an astronaut intended to help his niece process her grief. What neither of them realizes is that the completed game will play a key role in a seafaring adventure that takes place 600 years in the future. Weaving together multiple stories and forms (such as mythical, epistolary, and computer-game narratives), and told from different perspectives spanning centuries, Elan's novel offers an epic journey across time and space wrapped in a mystery. The game Becks creates,Homebound, becomes beloved by many others, including Tamar Portman, a Berkeley bioengineering professor, who, in the late 21st century, creates a type of advanced robot called an Aye. Like Becks' game, Tamar's creation goes beyond anything she expects when one Aye, Chaya, reveals awareness of their own lonely singularity. The robot survives into a future 400 years from the time of their making to become a crew member on a cargo ship trading in whatever "ghost-things from the past" its crew can salvage from the ocean. As Chaya bonds with Yesiko, the reluctant captain, they become driven to understand a story about a spaceship captain "written into [their] memory in the earliest days of [their] existence." Unique and complex, this novel tells an unexpectedly moving story of love, loss, and how the past shapes--and haunts--our present. An ingenious narrative that explores the meaning of love and interconnectedness across time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.