HOMEBOUND

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.