"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (Atria Books, 2025)
The latest novel from Lincoln Michel, Metallic Realms, is an ambitious literary genre mash-up that aims to be many things at once: a satire of golden age sci-fi, a knowing portrait of millennial artistic life in Brooklyn, a skewering of online fandom and toxic fans, and a primer on how to write science fiction. Perhaps because of the scope of these ambitions, as well as the limitations of the book’s unreliable narrator, Metallic Realms exhausts its ideas before its various strands are pulled together with any clear thematic payoff. The book says a lot of things, primarily about the intersections between art and life, between fantasy and reality, but it never coheres into an argument about the relation of these dualities. I finished the book compelled by the subject but not knowing what Michel was trying to say.
Writing mainly on his Substack, Counter Craft, Michel is a sharp critic when it comes to sci-fi and fantasy as well as our larger cultural moment. He has critiqued AI’s ability to write short stories, famously embroiled himself in a debate about worldbuilding, and explained the growing popularity of genre writing among literary authors. In a world where most sci-fi and fantasy criticism is dominated by anti-woke YouTubers, Michel’s voice is necessary and refreshing. But that doesn’t mean his lucid critical analysis can be neatly applied to his own fiction, especially in a novel whose very premise is like a test case for Michel’s ideas about art.
Metallic Realms tells the story of the Orb 4, a Brooklyn sci-fi collective whose writing and lives are chronicled obsessively by Michael Lincoln, who rooms with two of the Orb 4’s members but is never invited into the group himself. This doesn’t stop Michael from constantly hovering and spying, hinting at an invitation while bugging a fern so he can record the group’s sessions. He gains access to their Google drive and becomes their self-proclaimed “official lore keeper,” piecing together the group’s stories—this is the book we are reading—without permission.
This aspect of the story is when Metallic Realms works best: as a send-up of toxic fandom. By the end of the book, Michael’s obsession with the group and his manipulation of its members have ruined their friendships and caused tragedy to befall Taras, Michael’s childhood friend and the one member who sticks up for him. He does this all in the service of art—of the stories and worldbuilding the Orb 4 are creating—but he is really filling the void left by his own social and artistic failures. Tellingly, Michael is putting the finishing touches on the book we are reading in a basement (not even his own mother’s, but his friend’s mother’s basement no less), the legendary lair of trolls everywhere. This also seems to be a callback to another famous antisocial rant, Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground.
Most readers of Michel’s novel will have hopefully spared themselves exposure to the worst of the online rage that the Star Wars sequels or Amazon’s Rings of Power or the Little Mermaid remake have met with, based on accusations of wokeness, “bad writing,” and departure from “canon.” This is the mouth-foaming fury you might hear about secondhand: that there are Hobbits and Elves and mermaids with darker skin—there’s nothing in the lore!—or that Luke Skywalker could be a washed-up middle-aged failure, replaced by Rey—but she’s such a Mary Sue!
There is strong evidence that this kind of online ragebaiting, which has gone mainstream in our politics and culture, started in nerd subcultures. (See, for example, Charlie Warzel’s 2019 article in the New York Times, “How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War.”) Michel’s portrait of his basement-dwelling doppelganger Michael seems to give us an understanding of who might be behind these screens and screeds, but it doesn’t go deep enough to explain why Michael’s life is failing. Why is there a void to begin with? We get the standard complaints about external forces—Trump, the economy, a bleak and hopeless future for humanity—but as valid as these are, Michael himself is strangely insubstantial. There’s a depthless quality to him that borders on the cartoonish. Events of the past decade—especially the past year—seem driven by the rage of white men who have lost their power and are now doing whatever they can to claw it back, even if it means destroying what they claim to love. Metallic Realms misses a chance to round out Michael’s character, to make him more than a comic type, and in doing so explain something essential about our age.
It is through Michael’s narration and commentary that Michel also weaves together the book’s three other strands, and this is where the use of an unreliable narrator becomes problematic, closing off rather than opening up the narrative possibilities of Michel’s inventive structure. First, there are the collected stories written by the members of the Orb 4, The Star Rot Chronicles, with each character in the Star Rot crew an alter ego of someone in the group. The stories are satires of pulpy, golden age sci-fi crossed with ensemble television series such as Firefly or Star Trek, but to pull off the imaginative goal Michel has set himself, they would need to stand on their own as compelling fictions. Disappointingly, they don’t do that. Instead, they are trying to do so many things at once that their aims work at cross purposes. Their satirizing of familiar sci-fi styles and tropes is often effective, but this quality makes them nearly impossible to take seriously as absorbing stories in their own right. They are also meant to illuminate the characters and relationships of the real life members of the group, but their intentional amateurishness diminishes any deeper revelations about the writers themselves or the other members. The uneven quality of the stories does allow us to understand something about Michael himself—that his obsession with their greatness is hyperbolic and more than a little concerning—but in many ways we already know this through his own voice. Ultimately, these are a collection of short, pulpy, slightly silly satires, rather than the kind of complex, absorbing stories that a book like this demands. The obvious comparison would be to a novel such as Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, in which the individual stories are mysterious and resonant, each of them informing the larger narrative as it’s being constructed. In Metallic Realms, the relationship between the stories, the group who wrote them, and the person compiling them ends up seeming like a promising but incomplete thought instead of the central thread tying everything together.
The addition of Michael’s nerdsplaining about the Orb 4 tales, in both an introduction and an afterword to each of the nine stories, doesn’t help. That these commentaries grow tiresome is part of the point (people like Michael are tiresome), but by story four a certain exhaustion sets in. For example, Michael explains to us that a story called “The Ones Who Must Choose in El’Omas” is a “subtle reference” to LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Clearly there’s nothing subtle about the reference, making the Orb 4 version an obvious pastiche while exposing Michael’s commentaries as the height of geekdom pedantry. The story itself is an overbearing and predictable meditation on why society allows suffering to occur, with obvious overtones of our current political reality. It ends with a call to fight injustice and “to resist an evil system”—“What are you doing right now?”—that feels exactly like what young people who are not fighting injustice would write online, but it makes Michael’s reaction to the story difficult to take seriously, even through the framing of his character. That he loves the story, and that its flaws go over his head, fits perfectly with who he is, but the reader’s inability at this point to tell whether the stories are meant to be good or bad or something in between, makes Michael’s overbearing elaboration crowd out any insight or honest response we might have formed on our own. Again, that may be the point—the effect of Michael’s obsession, the smothering of the actual creative work—but it drags the book’s momentum to a halt.
The second narrative element in Metallic Realms involves the lives of this Brooklyn writing crew. Taras is falling in and out of love with Darya, Jane is an aspiring literary author slumming it with the Orb 4 while writing her breakout autofiction, The Museum of Normal Things (excerpts of which are a highlight of Michel’s book), Merlin is a nonbinary game designer and social media expert. Because we are mostly seeing these lives through Michael, we only get a surface level view of their personal crises and their relationships to one another. Each of them is a millennial type playing out their generational ambitions and struggles (especially about money, success, aging, and commitment) more as representational stand-ins than individual characters.
When everyone in the book, including Michael himself, is mostly a type to begin with and is then described through Michael’s misanthropic lens, they don’t have a chance to become well rounded enough to care about. Their real struggles occur at an unretrievable distance, while Michael’s comic voice crowds the foreground.
Despite Michael’s limitations as a character, the creation of his voice, however distancing or reductive, is Michel’s biggest accomplishment in Metallic Realms. Michael’s is a brilliant comic voice that Michel constantly undercuts through snippets of overheard dialogue and excerpts of texts and documents that Michael hasn’t written, along with scenes that Michael records faithfully with an unawareness of his own ridiculous role in the action. Michael is also spot on with his sci-fi and fantasy references, even the most obscure, allowing us to trust at least his base of knowledge if not his judgment or understanding.
The final narrative thread of the book, which is embedded within Michael’s obsessive analysis of the Orb 4, is some very serious commentary on sci-fi and fantasy that appears to reflect Michel’s own thinking, based on his Counter Craft essays. Michael and Michel share the same views on worldbuilding, for example, and you can find the key points in Michel’s essay on the subject explained by Michael in the book. But there’s a fundamental problem in making an unreliable narrator the mouthpiece for the author’s own points of view: If we are meant to see through Michael’s blindness and self-delusion, how are we to read his thoughtful, clear-headed interpretation of the very subject of the book? Michel’s ideas about sci-fi make sense, therefore so do Michael’s. But if that’s the case, then what does it mean that Michael takes the Orb 4 tales as works of genius while Michel revels in their satire? As a narrator, Michael is a more interesting character when he is misguided, but when he starts making too much sense, his unreliability itself becomes unreliable, and the exquisite calibration required to pull everything off slips another notch.
In the second section of Notes From Underground, "Apropos of the Wet Snow,” we escape the narrator’s manifesto to see him from a different perspective, giving us a chance to understand his lived experience rather than listen to him tell us what it means. This is when we’re able to see how Dostoevsky’s narrator arrived at the place he is now, having failed at one last chance for human connection, an event that sent him spiraling into a life of lonely self-obsession and endless rage.
At the end of Metallic Realms, Michel reaches for such a moment of actual human drama with a tragic death, but the emotional impact is distanced by Michael’s narration, which overlays the tragedy with comic ambiguity and very strong hints at his own complicity. The book’s ending—Michael putting the finishing touches on the book we’re reading while hiding from the cops—becomes the disturbing triumph of an unfeeling troll. But are we meant to see Michael purely as a villain? Despite having spent so many pages with him, his true motivations and their consequences are still obscure, either to us or to him. If Metallic Realms had allowed Michael a glimpse at the horror of what he’d achieved, his struggle to reconcile that with his view of himself might have explained something about our isolated yet overconnected digital age. Through Michael, we might have understood the roots of the poisoned well we’ve all been drinking from the past twenty years. Incel culture, ginned-up outrage, trolling, canceling, doxxing, the practices that started in the dark spaces of the internet are now flourishing in the light of day, infecting every platform, rotting our politics, eroding our perception of one another as human beings. Instead, the book leaves us, after an intermittently successful comic journey, back where we began: pushing our way through the onrushing flood, grasping for ways to explain what we’ve lost and what we’re becoming.