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While We're Young
Mike Orion waited on a warped, stained street corner outside the Chaplain Hotel, a pub on the northern edge of Natura. Last drinks here in the undercity, Downtown, before the Uptown border and its gilded elevator that carried citizens and passholders up to the holy sunkissed overcity. Two loves of comfort and despair, Uptown, two cities of Natura.
Wealthy young Uptowner Edie Hamilton, all charm but worn out by existence, is Downtown on one last drinking binge before she quits Earth for Mars. Her bartender for the night, Mike Orion, himself a devoted drunk, is desperate to get to Mars, and falls hard for Edie, who's prepared to use her Uptown travel rights to take him with her. But Mike instead accepts a job from his mysterious friend and benefactor Robert he's to escort a child android shell to the terraformed red planet — a child shell, but animated with the mind of Vela Lenn, Goodis’s ex-partner. While Goodis means to keep his promise to Vela to destroy her mind should it become too far separated from her body, Mike is fixated on settling into an idyllic life on Mars with Edie, whose overpowering maternal love for the child android shell makes it impossible for her to envisage happiness without Vela.
Wealthy young Uptowner Edie Hamilton, all charm but worn out by existence, is Downtown on one last drinking binge before she quits Earth for Mars. Her bartender for the night, Mike Orion, himself a devoted drunk, is desperate to get to Mars, and falls hard for Edie, who's prepared to use her Uptown travel rights to take him with her. But Mike instead accepts a job from his mysterious friend and benefactor Robert he's to escort a child android shell to the terraformed red planet — a child shell, but animated with the mind of Vela Lenn, Goodis’s ex-partner. While Goodis means to keep his promise to Vela to destroy her mind should it become too far separated from her body, Mike is fixated on settling into an idyllic life on Mars with Edie, whose overpowering maternal love for the child android shell makes it impossible for her to envisage happiness without Vela.
210 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 11, 2022
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January 24, 2023
Daniel Stephenson's While We're Young is a lush but measured novel of distant futures, interplanetary travel and new forms of the self. Beneath the protective environmental curtain of the hemiseal, a human life extends far beyond its ken through the miracle drug Lysidol and the advent of cybernetics, extraterrestrial contact and artificial life. Life, unshackled from its traditional boundaries, has radically changed, but many things (exploitation, violence, poverty, pain) have stayed the same.
Mike Orion, a man older than even he remembers, craves a good, idyllic death, to "get gone," but what he truly needs is love, a love that transcends the isolating shells of the fallen worlds and selves that spread out in all directions. He meets Edie Hamilton, a woman of impossible pedigree and heartache, who might just need the same.
Dan has accomplished something extraordinary here. Under the guiding light of novelist Inez Baranay, Dan has crafted a dense and fascinating world, sparkling to life through gorgeous prose and a vibrant pace. The world unravels to the reader in pieces, never overwhelming you, always in lock-step with the deeply human element of every character, no matter how human they are.
If you ever wished Blade Runner was a little more French New Wave, this is the book for you. It is tragic and life-affirming, live-wire and deeply patient, a meditation on aging, on bodies, on literature and its transcendent power, but above all, how we are saved and damned in equal measure by the love we give and find in others.
I cannot recommend this one highly enough.
Mike Orion, a man older than even he remembers, craves a good, idyllic death, to "get gone," but what he truly needs is love, a love that transcends the isolating shells of the fallen worlds and selves that spread out in all directions. He meets Edie Hamilton, a woman of impossible pedigree and heartache, who might just need the same.
Dan has accomplished something extraordinary here. Under the guiding light of novelist Inez Baranay, Dan has crafted a dense and fascinating world, sparkling to life through gorgeous prose and a vibrant pace. The world unravels to the reader in pieces, never overwhelming you, always in lock-step with the deeply human element of every character, no matter how human they are.
If you ever wished Blade Runner was a little more French New Wave, this is the book for you. It is tragic and life-affirming, live-wire and deeply patient, a meditation on aging, on bodies, on literature and its transcendent power, but above all, how we are saved and damned in equal measure by the love we give and find in others.
I cannot recommend this one highly enough.
Displaying 1 of 1 review