Review: "High We Go in the Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu, 2022

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How High We Go in the Dark is Sequoia Nagamatsu's debut novel about a climate change virus in 2030. The book has drawn a lot of comparisons to Mandel's Station Eleven. The book is a vignette of short stories interlinked loosely by people, themes, places, time, and death.

A 30,000-year-old arctic virus is released from permafrost around the 2030s and has effects rippling into humanity's future. All the stories center around death, letting go, and ways we as humans deal with the frailty of life.

There are certainly quite a few exciting ideas and inventions presented by the author that suggests science-fiction is the category this fits in. However, I think some of the science and circumstance is close enough to our time and current technology to be considered speculative fiction.

I think the essential stories bookend the novel, with the middle ones slouching, with the exception of the story detailing the USS Yamato and humanity's journey into the stars. I became excited at the halfway point when humans left to colonize another star system and hoped the author continued that thread. Instead, the timelines diverged, and we find ourselves in the past, picking up where the plague left off when the USS Yamato departed Earth. The story's trajectory and divergence seem to work together, but I don't feel the author quite brought everything together at the end.

I rate this 4 out of 5 stars.

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