Books book reviews Space Travel and Rough Drafts: On Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms Fantastic universes and personal dramas collide as a group of friends blur the line between real life and fiction. By Tobias S. Buckell | Published on June 4, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share It’s a story as old as time: two artists equal parts friends and rivals; one destined for glory, the other destined to document a more successful peer. This dynamic is at the heart of the film Amadeus and Steven Millhauser’s novel Edwin Mullhouse, about a genius novelist who is also an elementary school-aged child. When he announced the sale of his new novel Metallic Realms, Lincoln Michel wrote that “‘Pale Fire meets Star Trek’ was my personal pitch.” So, yes, there’s a bit of that dynamic at play here as well, though in the case of Michel’s novel the narrator isn’t recounting the life of one higher-profile writer; instead, they’re discussing the work of a writing collective known as the Orb 4. Our narrator here is one Michael Lincoln and, as strange as this might seem, this is not a roman à clef. Instead, it’s a book within a book: Memoirs of My Metallic Realms: The Collected Star Rot Chronicles. A title page for the book within a book tells the reader up front that they’ll be reading “[t]ales by the Orb 4 writing collective: Taras K. Castle, Darya Azali, Jane Noh Johnson, and S.O.S. Merlin.” Lincoln’s contributions include editing the stories, as well as “notes, commentary, analysis, and musings,” along with a foreword, introduction, afterword, and after-afterword.  There are two threads that run throughout this book. The first is the story of Lincoln and the Orb 4 members; it’s set in present-day New York and recounts Lincoln’s growing fixation on the writing collective to which his childhood friend Taras belongs. The other thread is the shared universe the members of Orb 4 set their stories in, about the crew of a stolen spacecraft having adventures throughout the galaxy.  These stories begin with Taras’s “The Duchy of the Toe Adam,” in which captain Baldwin, first mate Vivian, and pilot Aul-Wick attempt to escape a planet where rival religious factions venerate versions of their leader cloned from disparate body parts—hence, the existence of both Nose Adamites and Toe Adamites, as well as the presence of cloning facilities throughout the planet, something that will have an impact on future Orb 4 stories.   Vivian’s species had evolved a million light-years away from Earth, yet she looked exactly human except for her mood-displaying veins and ridged cheekbones. The universe was weird like that. Gradually, Michel reveals more about the dynamics within the group. Taras has ambitions of writing as a career. Darya has a background in marine biology; their respective fictional avatars are, much like their creators, in an occasionally volatile relationship. S.O.S. Merlin, who has a foothold in the board gaming community as well, uses an android named Algorithm as their stand-in, while Jane’s avatar is the Fourth Ibbit, a member of a lemur-like species who periodically evolves into a new form; there are echoes of both Time Lords on Doctor Who and Kath Amalthova Two in Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves to be found there. (Memorable references to science fiction ephemera abound in this novel, such as the name of Michael’s pet bird, Arthur C. Caique.) Buy the Book Metallic Realms Lincoln Michel Buy Book Metallic Realms Lincoln Michel Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Jane also has a foothold in another creative community: She’s pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the same time as being a member of Orb 4. That aspect of her character also means that Metallic Realms contains plenty of discourse about the lines between “literary” and “genre” fiction, whether that divide even exists, and whether or not it’s a good thing. There’s a lot of rumination on the craft of writing, the nature of worldbuilding, and the importance of continuity, both by the characters themselves and by the broader text.  The self-referentiality approaches escape velocity at one point, when several of the Orb 4 collective encounter the writings of one Lincoln Michel online and assume that he’s an alias being used by narrator Michael Lincoln. At least in Michael’s telling, this isn’t true—but the question of how reliable Michael is as a narrator is a motif that runs throughout this novel. (That said, I can confirm that there is real-world precedent for this sort of thing; there’s a prominent anti-abortion activist named Carol Tobias.) The members of the Orb 4 collective each have fictional stand-ins in their shared universe, and later in the novel Michael learns that one of the collective’s members has also created at least one other set of fictional characters inspired by the group’s members. There’s a line in Martin Amis’s bleakly funny look at literary rivalry, The Information—the book that, for my money, Metallic Realms ends up being closest to, tonally speaking—wherein the less successful of two writer frenemies alludes to a novel with a “rotating crew of sixteen unreliable narrators.” In his novel, Amis keeps things from becoming too discursive through a heavy dose of grim comedy; in Metallic Realms, Michel keeps things from tipping too far over into the realm of literary gamesmanship through a growing sadness at the heart of his novel. One example: There’s a scene where Michael joins Taras for dinner with the latter’s parents, as he’s known them for decades. He notes that Taras’s father has lost a significant amount of weight, but doesn’t think too much of it. Later, Taras confides in him that his father has cancer. Michael is surprised; the reader is not. Very early in the novel, Taras asks Michael if he wants to join the group; Michael replies, “I could never join.” That will prove to be a fateful decision; it’ll also inform the contradictions at the center of the story. Much of what we’re reading here is filtered through Michael’s perspective; he’s someone who believes that these stories are utterly groundbreaking, but he also has a troubling relationship with boundaries. There’s a stray line wherein he mentions using a hidden microphone to record all of the Orb 4 meetings, for instance—one of many signs that Michael might not be the most reliable of narrators. That’s not entirely accurate, though. Michael isn’t an unreliable narrator as much as he’s a self-abnegating one. His own perspective contrasts with Taras and Jane, both of whom have literary ambitions and are far more willing to pursue them directly. What’s unfortunate is that Jane seems to be a far better writer than Taras. And it’s here that Michel gets to the more unnerving part of Michael’s ongoing project: He seems to have dedicated a disproportionate amount of time and energy to elevating writing of highly disparate quality. It’s here that the craft of Metallic Realms comes into play: Some of the Orb 4 stories are compelling in their own right, while others play out like clever homages and parodies. (One of them is titled “The Ones Who Must Choose in El’Omas.”) There’s a gulf between the quality of the actual stories and the reverence with which Michael treats them, even the Orb 4 stories remain eminently readable within the context of the larger novel. (Which also puts this book in the realm of stories with fictional science fiction writers.) There are a series of events near the end of Metallic Realms that makes certain elements of the novel as a whole click into place a little differently. Michel’s previous book, The Body Scout, was a science fiction detective novel with plenty of baseball in its DNA. The mystery at the center of that book gave it a familiar arc. Metallic Realms is a more chaotic novel, but that’s to be expected given its polyphonic approach. It’s a space opera, a commentary on the craft of fiction, a story of literary rivalry, and an unexpectedly moving study of a friendship. These realms are vast, indeed.[end-mark] Metallic Realms is published by Atria Books. The post Space Travel and Rough Drafts: On Lincoln Michel’s <i>Metallic Realms</i> appeared first on Reactor.