Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett

[lightreads]

Elysium

3/5. How to describe this? A string of vignettes setting personal concerns – illness, disputes, romance -- against glimpses of an alien invasion of Earth and its aftermath. Except each vignette reshuffles the constellation of main characters, changing genders and interrelationships and sociological settings. The main two are sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes lovers, sometimes siblings, sometimes something else.

This is strange and slippery and very accomplished, on a technical level. The shape of an actual novel doesn’t emerge until the last quarter or so; before that it’s all in the art of the iterative vignettes that circle the same stories from different angles. There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot of it remains inexplicable to me (WTF with the owl, I ask you?). The parts I do get are playing interesting rhetorical games with science fictional tropes and gender, which I dig.

So I found this rewarding. But it’s also just that little bit not my thing, and I suspect someone whose more interested in metafiction would get more out of this.

Comments

[readerjane]

It sounds like the kaleidoscopic view you get from reading multiple AU fics written from the same canon.

Which could be fascinating, but maybe hard to get attached to the fic characters when they keep shifting?

[lightreads]

Yep, exactly.