Author of
Station Eleven and
Sea of Tranquillity.
Formative fiction in my life included a hefty dose of the tail-end of “golden age”
sci-fi. In college, a singular professor encouraged using the same standards applied to
literature, and applying those critical processes to the
sci-fi of the time. Some golden age, some older, some newer. Same standards. The simple hypothesis was that some of that material, plenty of examples to draw from, but some of that was
literature of ideas as much as it was
sci-fi.
Exit Party starts at a point in time, not too distant from where we are now. Easy enough to see, an idea echoed across realms of futuristic stories, the current United States all split up in warring factions, the basic collapse of current societal standards.
Nesting dolls, time travel, the same story told from different points-of-view, back and forth? The cleverness of the storytelling itself is invigorating, and the possible futures that are etched out in novelistic detail? Again, breathtaking.
It’s two halves of the same middle, the outcome, neither one is desirable, but which one is better?
