Books book reviews The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu is Layered and Uncategorizable Alex Brown reviews “a stunning achievement from a creative powerhouse.” By Alex Brown | Published on May 12, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share What would you do if the only way to save the world was to kill your mother? Could you do it, could you kill the person you love to keep everyone else alive? What does that say about you if you could? What does it say if you couldn’t? That is the conundrum Ellie faces at the opening of John Chu’s The Subtle Art of Folding Space. Her mother is dying and the cause may not be wholly natural, but there may be a way to bring her back… at the expense of everyone else. But this isn’t really a story about her mother. It’s about what comes after Ellie makes her fateful choice. Ellie is a maintainer for the skunkworks that make physics work in the universe and keep reality chugging along. Every universe has a skunkworks, and every skunkworks has maintainers. There are builders like Ellie, her mom, and her cruel sister Chris who implement the gates and pipes that form the designs created by architects to fix errors, patch or bridge changes, and “generate the next universe.” Her cousin, Daniel, is a verifier, someone who makes sure the architectural designs are accurate and who diagnose problems for builders to fix. It’s Chris who sends Ellie into the skunkworks one fateful afternoon to check a glitch, and Daniel who helps her realize the problem is connected to her dying mother. Whoever created the “hold-time violations” has trapped her mother in a coma for some unknown purpose, and it’s wreaking havoc on the reality generated by the skunkworks. The longer she stays hovering between life and death, the worse things will get. Ripples will become a tsunami, and Ellie must choose: pull the plug and resolve the violations, or get her mother back alive and hale and likely furious at Ellie letting the world crumble around them. I won’t spoil the choice Ellie makes, but I can tell you that it is not where the book ends. It is only the beginning. The bulk of the plot consists of the consequences of that choice. Ellie and Daniel are sent back into the skunkworks to fix the fundamental error the culprit exploited, ferret out who was behind the glitch, and stop a faction of rabble rousers from causing anymore damage. As she and her cousin hop around realities, they confront a lifetime of familial trauma. Much of the story has to do with an experience that is familiar to a lot of people, but is often a big topic of conversation among Asian immigrant families. Ellie’s mother immigrated before her children were born. As the oldest daughter, Chris has certain expectations put on her that Ellie does not, but as toxic as Chris is, she makes being unable to live up to those impossible expectations her entire personality. She kept their ill mother trapped in her home under the guise of doing her daughterly duty and taking care of her. She ignores her own family so she can put all her energy into obsessing over her mother and sister. And she spent most of Ellie’s life setting elaborate death traps that kept Ellie on edge and unable to trust. When Daniel came to live with them after his parents kicked him out for being gay, Chris turned her evil eye to him, but it was Ellie who got the worst of it. You might expect Ellie’s mother to step in, but at every turn she merely told Ellie to be nicer to Chris. As much as Ellie longed for Chris’ affection, Chris longed for her mother’s approval. Both are still unsatisfied at the start of the novel.  Buy the Book The Subtle Art of Folding Space John Chu Buy Book The Subtle Art of Folding Space John Chu Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Daniel and Ellie make for an interesting pair. While each had rough childhoods of abandonment, rejection, and terror, Daniel is more stable than his cousin. Daniel got himself a found family, as queer folks are wont to do, and built a new life on his own terms. Ellie has a life outside her family and the skunkworks, but she seems like a visitor at most. She spends all her free time visiting her mother and getting raked over the coals by Chris. She is even willing to give up what little life she has to return home to help Chris take care of their mother. She lacks the stability and freedom a found family offers, and this allows her to believe against all odds that one day Chris will finally accept her.  The way Chu describes Daniel versus Ellie caught my attention. Ellie is our protagonist, and the third person narration hovers over her shoulder. Consequently, the book tends to describe her in terms that are diminishing. Daniel, meanwhile, is heaped with praise. He is described almost like a god walking among us. He is imposing and handsome, a bulky hunk where she is small and unassuming. It’s a clever way to demonstrate how inferior Ellie feels in her life, and how Chris has exacerbated that. It’s not that Daniel really is this perfectly chilled giant of a man, but that all she can see are his perfections in stark contrast to her imperfections. Everything in him that is good gets magnified when put up against everything she thinks is bad in herself, and everything she dislikes about herself gets intensified when put up against everything she likes in Daniel. That said, sometimes the narration gets a little lost in the sauce when it comes to Daniel. By the end, he seems almost like a superhero from a comic book movie rather than a real person. Readers used to straightforward stories that can easily be categorized may feel frustrated with this story. This is anything but neat and tidy. You cannot apply a list of fanfic tropes or trendy genre marketing terms to it. It will be a challenge for some readers who insist on everything being thoroughly explained and the worldbuilding systematized into easy to digest tropes and recognizable concepts. Readers will end this book with as many questions as they started it with. Chu makes the reader put in the work.  The Subtle Art of Folding Space is primed for the “what’s the difference between science fiction and fantasy” debate. When Chu delved into how the skunkworks functions and the physics of the world, I reacted the same way I always do when encountering hard SF (i.e. my least favorite science fiction): My eyes glazed over and my head filled with white noise. I could not keep the words still on the page, and when I switched to the audiobook I felt like I was listening to an adult in Charlie Brown. For the life of me, I could not understand how any of the stuff was supposed to be happening. Have you ever read a romance novel where you have to stop mid sex scene to figure out the choreography? That’s what I felt like trying to wade through the characters explaining the science underpinning the skunkworks. To be clear, that’s a me problem more than a Chu problem. Readers who dig that sort of thing will have a great time. On the other hand, the novel often also felt like fantasy. Ellie shoots fire from her hands; Daniel can create delicious dishes out of nothing; the characters teleport and weave strange images from their minds; and creatures from other worlds feel less like aliens and more like something from Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura. I’d argue the book falls more strongly into science-ficitonland than fantasyland, given the premise, but as a passionate lover of fantasy fiction I had fun jumping between the two states. The Subtle Art of Folding Space is John Chu’s first full length novel after more than a decade in the short fiction mines. It’s a stunning achievement from a creative powerhouse. The more I think about the book, the more layers I pick out, like I’m diving into the skunkworks myself.[end-mark] The Subtle Art of Folding Space is published by Tor Books. The post <i>The Subtle Art of Folding Space</i> by John Chu is Layered and Uncategorizable appeared first on Reactor.