BABYLON, SOUTH DAKOTA

A beguiling work of speculative fiction set in the American outback.

If Lin’s eccentric story gains wide circulation—and it deserves to—then South Dakota may soon be thought of as a place where innocent dogs are routinely shot. Hsiu Keng and his wife, Lee Mei, have immigrated from Mao-era China to a 160-acre farm seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Keng takes the biblical name Saul, but Mei, nothing if not resolute, stands firm in keeping her Chinese name, along with habits such as squirreling away gold against the day when everything goes pear-shaped. Saul dreams of growing chrysanthemums—but the federal government arrives to take a chunk of their property for a missile silo. Strange things happen then: This isn’t just the site of an intercontinental ballistic missile meant to blast Cold War opponents to smithereens, but also a laboratory for a transdimensional contraption that promises eternal life, if not necessarily in this dimension. Enter a dog, shot repeatedly and yet immortal, freed by an airman named Abram Song and taken in by Saul and Mei’s daughter, Mara. Things in Lin’s sophomore novel begin to take ever stranger turns: A self-styled alchemist enters the picture and the paterfamilias falls into a long, deathlike sleep (echoes of García Márquez’s magic realism), while Abram’s assurance that Project Methuselah “protects its users absolutely from the possibility of death” portends a hard SF twist worthy of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (2014). There are ghosts, or at least thermodynamic traces, and hidden chambers, and scheming warmongers and bureaucrats, and a mad Strangelovian colonel (“Even if World War III kicks off, those guys down there won’t die.…in the worlds where they don’t die, well, they knock the dust off their coveralls and fire their missiles right back”), and a pleasantly meandering storyline that, against the odds, ties everything together. Oh, and plenty of hidden gold, too.

A thoughtfully written, genre-crossing novel of great ingenuity.