Love Chronicles of the Octopodes

by Karen An-hwei Lee

In a dystopic future of unregulated gene editing, a woman named Emily wakes up on the wrong side of the universe as an octopus thanks to rogue “designer genes” run amok. One of thousands of clones generated from a genetic code sequenced from a lock of hair saved from the original Emily Dickinson, the ersatz Emily resembles an octopus but harbors the soul of a human poet and navigates her life in a lagoon as a bumbling “rogue soul” enamored of black spice cake, botanical monographs, and gingerbread recipes, while romanced by personified moonlight.

Praise for Love Chronicles of the Octopodes

Poet, translator, and novelist Lee (The Maze of Transparencies) shows off all her talents in this singular sci-fi novel… Lee’s confident, graceful, and richly poetic writing expands the strange, dreamlike narrative in all directions at once, like slow outward ripples of water. The result is a lyrical meditation on art, science, and consciousness that readers won’t soon forget.
—Publishers Weekly

The language is plated and dexterous, an exosuit for contemplations that has no trouble craning into the weird shapes they demand. Philosophical, xenosagacious, exquisitely attuned to the soul-kicking improbabilities that animate it, Love Chronicles is a fugitive experiment in confessing the unreal truth of our all-defining displacements.
—Ian Dreiblatt, Spamzine

Karen An-Hwei Lee, whose marvelous mind gave us Kafka — weird as ever and wonderfully alive — in twenty-first century Los Angeles and then a post-apocalyptic data cloud on a quest for the keys to happiness, outdoes herself with this brilliant head bend of a book. Love Chronicles of the Octopodes chronicles the adventures of one Emily D, octopus extraordinaire whose signal genetic material can be traced back to a certain legendary poet from Amherst but whose verve and swerve are all her own. Which is to say that Emily D is an original. As is Lee. There is no one else at work on the American scene like her.
—Laird Hunt, National Book Award finalist and author of Zorrie

Have you ever watched the hues of a sleeping octopus shift dreamily from bright chartreuse to ghostly pale blue and from ghostly pale blue to the color of evening skies? If so, the wonder you felt is similar to the wonder you will feel reading Love Chronicles of the Octopodes, every page of which astounds and abounds with dazzling lyricism, narrative innovation, and prose textures movingly evocative of otherworldly sentience. With ingenuity and care, Karen An-hwei Lee incorporates research on cephalopods, black holes, genome editing, and the life and work of Emily Dickinson into sublime experimentations with language and genre. The result is art—and the art is powerfully transformative. To be submerged in the gorgeous songfulness of Karen An-hwei Lee’s science fiction is to find oneself metamorphosing into a novel life form. I woke up from the dreamscapes of this book with exclamation marks in my brain and a new, tentacular, bioluminescent sense of possibility.
—Seo-Young Chu, author of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation

Is there anyone in the literary universe who quite writes, sounds or undulates like Karen An-Hwei Lee? If David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress were spliced with My Octopus Teacher and Rachel Carson’s Sea Trilogy, it might come close to producing Emily, an inquisitive, “accidental” octopus with a penchant for spice cake and philosophical ruminations on the fate of rogue genomes and the enigma that is our souls. Singular and shimmering.
—Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of Activities of Daily Living

Genres: Science Fiction

236 pages, Paperback

Published March 23, 2023

Reviews

[Seo-Young Chu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever watched the hues of a sleeping octopus shift dreamily from bright chartreuse to ghostly pale blue and from ghostly pale blue to the color of evening skies? If so, the wonder you felt is similar to the wonder you will feel reading Love Chronicles of the Octopodes, every page of which astounds and abounds with dazzling lyricism, narrative innovation, and prose textures movingly evocative of otherworldly sentience. With ingenuity and care, Karen An-hwei Lee incorporates research on cephalods, black holes, genome editing, and the life and work of Emily Dickinson into sublime experimentations with language and genre. The result is art—and the art is powerfully transformative. To be submerged in the gorgeous songfulness of Karen An-hwei Lee’s science fiction is to find oneself metamorphosing into a novel life form. I woke up from the dreamscapes of this book with exclamation marks in my brain and a new, tentacular, bioluminescent sense of possibility.

[Julie Capell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Since I like poetry and scifi and experimental novels (and octopusses!), I thought I'd give this a try. The book has an offbeat charm and some interesting phrasing, but I found that often I coudn't parse what the author was really trying to say. Here's a good example:

... a trio of hearts like a chapbook of blue asters and cornflowers, my jewels in a copper vault of viscera, a drop of ocean dissolved therein. . . . I am a ship named Emily with three sails, or a volcano touched by a fleecy trio of clouds, or the kissing spots of loaves made while touching each other in an oven, each one called a baisure.

Despite the lovely language, the equivalency between a heart and a chapbook escapes me, and comparing herself to a ship, volcano, and loaves of bread leaves me more confused than enlightened.

As for the scifi aspects of the novel, they are barely existant. Beyond the setup, which tells the reader that in some far future, genetic engineering has produced an octopus who thinks she is Emily Dickenson, there is really no science here. The most interesting science is contained in the footnotes, where there is a short reference to CRISPR and to an enzyme octopusses have for editing genetic material that apparently inspired the author. If you'd like to know more about these things, you'll have to find another book.

After getting about 2/3 of the way through, I decided not to finish. The meandering, cyclical nature of the discourse made me feel like I was reading the same thing over and over. Then I came to this sentence and thought, here is a great summary of the book, I don't think I need to read any more.

I overthink my thought experiments, questions to which no obvious answers surface, endlessly looping inside a labyrinth of cogitation."

[Pixie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Prose is way too dense/convoluted. If you like that, be aware it will take way longer to get through than the size of the book would suggest. The concept is great, but the few main ideas and plot points quickly became extremely repetitive. For me, it didn't help that this is a climate change dystopia, which are two things I don't really like. Maybe you like that. But as a reader, you might still think that if the main character is cloned from Emily Dickinson, the book should either have way better poetry, or leave out the poems. I was disappointed, not only because the concept had sounded so cool, but because I want to support indie publishers. But the fact is, after picking it up many times to slog through more pages, I finally decided to dnf it.

[Caitlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The idea of this is so neat, I really wanted to like it. It's so densely poetical, so meandering and contemplative, that I couldn't get into it. Gave it several tries, but not my cup of tea.

[Anna Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is such a vivid descriptions of octopodes in this book. It's very dense and slightly confusing about Emily, who is she, where is she, how many are out there, and even when is she.

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://5cense.com/23/1112.htm

[Sunay · Rating 1 out of 5]

shit book, tried to read it as a challenge to read a new author, ended up not liking it.