‘Metallic Realms’: Escape Hatch

It took me a moment to figure out Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel. The grandiloquent, high-minded prose by main character Michael Lincoln initially suggests a sincere metafiction about the importance of a story collection called the Star Rot Chronicles in science fiction history. The fact that this character is quite literally named, well, Michael Lincoln, hints at something far sillier.

But by the end of the novel, these elements have merged into something distinctly tragic and parasocial –  a story about writing itself, sci-fi or otherwise, functioning as passive-aggressive criticism of whatever arbitrary thing is bothering the writer.

All this to say that Michael Lincoln frames his analysis as if the sci-fi ideas in the Star Rot Chronicles short stories are what makes them so interesting. It’s fairly obvious, though, that the characters are unsubtle proxies for people in his actual life.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the Star Rot Chronicles themselves, about a motley crew of misfit smugglers in a spaceships-and-aliens setting, are pretty decent stories. Contrary to Michael Lincoln’s protestations, whether a story is actually good isn’t always all that relevant to its place in the literary canon, or even as to whether people read it. Your typical sci-fi writer these days gets tables at conventions and tries to get people to read their books. The more successful ones tend to just be the better salespeople.

Michael Lincoln has a much more idealized notion of literary success, thinking that he can bring the Star Rot Chronicles greater recognition by doing everything he can to hype them up, online or otherwise. This goes on even as it becomes clear that most of the writers in his circle seem fairly indifferent to the project, except as a fun way to kill time or passive-aggressively expound on their own ideas of the group’s increasingly toxic dynamics. There’s also the overarching irony of all the characters being underemployed millennials who think of themselves as creatives, vacillating on a spectrum between insufferable and self-pitying.

Michael Lincoln is consistently, honestly insufferable. Yet he becomes surprisingly tragic and endearing, simply because he actually wants the group to succeed when everyone else is in it for their own personal self-interest. That’s not to say that Michael Lincoln is especially sympathetic. He’s probably an unreliable narrator, obsessively trying to place everyone else in the best possible light even when doing so makes him seem like an unsettling weirdo. The ending is the first time an alternate explanation of the events is significantly worse than the one Michael Lincoln just told us.

The obvious comparison point is A Confederacy of Dunces, with Michael Lincoln functioning as an Ignatius J. Reilly buffoon without even the pretense that his verbosity is academic. But on further reflection, Michael Lincoln might actually be more of a Don Quixote-type character, whose jousting at windmills seems more menacing than humorous because the first-person narration makes it fairly clear that Michael Lincoln is nearly impossible to talk to, assuming anyone would even want to. The commonality between these three protagonists is that they all care about something, even if it’s something fairly stupid, in a world where no one else seems to care about anything.

Which might be the single most disturbing aspect of Metallic Realms writ large. The worlds of A Confederacy of Dunces and Don Quixote at least had pretensions of valuing the archetypal qualities their heroes mock. In many cases, Michael Lincoln’s values feel straight up imaginary. We have all seen anti-capitalist ideas in popular culture effusively overpraised in the discourse, as if once we have enough anti-capitalist stories then capitalism will finally crumble. Michael Lincoln idolizes these values in the Star Rot Chronicles, not because he knows or cares what capitalism is, but because he recognizes that they make the Star Rot Chronicles sound more important.

That the writing group members also hold half-hearted allegiance to anti-capitalist ideas is a sad, suitable irony. Despite better understanding the ideology than Michael Lincoln, they’re less able to put any principles into practice in their daily lives. They consistently value personal gain over group solidarity. If Michael Lincoln is mentally unstable, the main manifestation comes from his belief in imaginary friends. Not schizophrenia, mind you, or even just idolizing fictional sci-fi characters such that knowing the name and logo of Commander Benjamin Sisko’s baseball team is considered a point of pride.

No, Michael Lincoln just thinks that the real people he talks to every day are his friends, when it’s quite clear they can’t stand him. And it’s hard to fault Michael Lincoln — or anyone else — from choosing the fantasy world over that.