Computer games can get impressively complicated. A work of fiction that does justice to the possibilities of gaming and engages in an impressive feat of world-building would be a tricky achievement to pull off for even a veteran novelist. All the more reason to celebrate Portia Elan, who, in Homebound, her first novel, shows how to erect a scaffold for just such a narrative. More eye-popping still, she creates not just one but four distinct threads spanning seven centuries. The result is a surprisingly hopeful book that celebrates community and belonging, and the enduring magic of storytelling.

It starts in Cincinnati circa 1983, back when Hüsker Dü was a popular punk group. One of its fans is Becks, a Jewish woman in her first year of college who has dyed her hair black and is perpetually clad in band T-shirts. Like all the women who populate this thrilling novel, her interests lie beyond the traditional. She's taking Computer Syntax 101, a dull class that nonetheless keeps her away from Sheila, her mother, and gives her something to do when wealthy Veronica, her best friend, is busy with her boyfriend Jack.

Becks loves to code so much that she is teaching herself programming languages outside of the classroom setting so that she can one day create computer games. Like a lot of people who have difficulty forging meaningful in-person relationships, Becks finds comfort and solace in the discipline of computer programming. Coding makes her "invisible for a while. Not a loner, or a disappointment of a daughter." Not long ago, however, she wasn't alone: Uncle Ben, Sheila's brother, had shared with her his passion for creating computer games. He lived in Cambridge, Mass., where he worked as a programmer, and would send her code to experiment with. But Ben has died of what was then called GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, before it was known as AIDS.

Becks didn't know Ben was gay. She belatedly learns about his friend Elijah, who may have been his partner. That discovery is integral to the story, as are other revelations that set Elan's intricate plot in motion. At her grandmother's house she finds an envelope addressed to her in a box of Ben's belongings. Inside are four floppy disks labeled HOMEBOUND. They contain the code for a "text-based adventure" about an "interconnected world," a game Ben had hoped they could build together. In a message on the first disk, Ben not only confirmed that Elijah was indeed the love of his life but also wrote that he hoped Becks would finish the program for him.

Interspersed throughout this novel are stories from three other centuries, all of which connect to that program and to one another in ways that gradually become clear. One narrative thread is set in 2586, where a woman named Yesiko and her heavily tattooed assistant, Root, make their living transporting stolen goods, trading salvaged items, and transporting hum, a drug that can be "tattooed into the skin so that it could release slowly into the bloodstream." Yesiko would rather use her ship, the Babylon, "to follow the humpback whales on their long migrations," but first she has to settle a debt to Chante, a debt she incurred to pay for the nanites--microscopic robot machines--Root needs in order to live.

She thinks she sees a way out of debt when  two teenagers, Shula and Tov, offer her a large sum to transport them to the Caledonian Isles. The journey becomes more complex when Shula and Tov show up for the voyage with an Aye, a robot that was omnipresent before long-ago floods but are now are mostly relics. Its presence complicates the journey to reach Chante and thus affects Yesiko's chances to pay off her debt.

Added to the mix are the other storylines, which feature a late 21st-century scientist who gives up her job in academia to work for a laboratory that builds a new class of Aye that can do "autonomous ecosystem conservation and management"; an entrepreneur who invested in interstellar transport and later buys the laboratory and refocuses their research to send robots to marginally habitable planets; and an astronaut in 2090 on a mission to locate a missing ship.

The fun of Homebound lies in learning how these seemingly disparate storylines connect to one another, and how they relate to Becks, her burgeoning sexuality, and her discovery of who she really is. Elan does it all with a delicate touch, even when incorporating heavier elements, from references to Judaism to the fates of several characters. Whether Homebound is a welcome escape from reality or proof that kindred spirits are out there will be up to each reader. But everyone will likely rejoice at the startling achievement of this new literary talent. --Michael Magras

Portia Elan (photo: Clayton J. Mitchell)

Portia Elan studied history at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the University of Victoria before returning to California, where she has worked as a waitress, bookseller, teacher, and public librarian. She is a former Lambda Literary Fellow and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and an abundance of cats. Homebound (Scribner, May 5, 2026) is the story of a queer teenage woman in the 1980s, a 26th-century adventure, and an astronaut in 2090 trying to re-establish contact with a missing ship. But it's also a story of coming to terms with one's sexuality and finding one's crowd, all of it set against the backdrop of an ingenious online game.

Homebound is a work of speculative fiction. What draws you to this genre?

I grew up watching Star Trek with my parents, reading Tamora Pierce and Douglas Adams and Connie Willis. I'm interested in the ways that the speculative can act as a magnifying glass, bringing us up close on an aspect of people or relationships.

I wrote poetry for years before I wrote prose, and in poetry, we have a greater suspension of disbelief, a willingness to follow the internal logic of the poem, surreal as it might become. Speculative fiction allows us prose writers to play with the poets' tools and create a world whose logic and construction is rooted in the emotional question we're exploring. We can concretize the inner life of characters through the fabric of the book-world's strangeness.

There's also a part of me which hasn't outgrown the joy of asking, "What if?" and following the answers, deeper and deeper into my imagination! I think robots and spaceships and time travel are really cool.

What inspired you to focus on gaming?

Games are a conversation between players and designer, but I'm more curious about the ways that games are bounded-but-incomplete experiences, which the player completes. In that way, they are an unending conversation. As long as people are playing the game, the conversation continues. The idea of an unending conversation is woven throughout Homebound. How do we share stories and experiences? Games are a powerful way to do that.

I'm also interested in the empathy needed to write and create games--to understand what will frustrate or delight or confuse or emotionally move the player--as it requires that we imagine and design for people who experience and understand the world differently than we do. We have to meet the players as they are.

Many people derive comfort from the certainty of computer games. Can you talk about this element in general and, more specifically, how it pertains to your characters?

I was a high school teacher in a former professional life. A core part of the pedagogy I inherited from my mentor, Dr. Lanette Jimerson, was the understanding that the classroom is a container, and the teacher's job is, first and foundationally, to create a container in which it is safe and possible for learning to take place. In the classroom, that includes everything from what's on the walls to late work policies to how rules are enforced.

Games are also containers in which we understand what's expected of us, where the rules are knowable and predictable. We can open our hearts and minds inside the game and feel safe to immerse ourselves for a while.

The characters in Homebound start out with a set of rules they "can rest against," but by the end have found that not all of these rules serve them. They have to choose: to leave behind those rules which once made them feel protected, or to remain inside a constrictive safety?

I think this is a fundamental part of the human project: we (hopefully) outgrow one container, and have to seek a new understanding of certainty, like little emotional hermit crabs, expanding our empathy and interconnectedness.

You focus a lot on the nature of storytelling, such as Becks's statement that her uncle gave her "a structure and a plot" for the game he hoped she'd finish building. What are your thoughts on the power of storytelling?

When I was 14 or 15, I discovered Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch, a series of nested, retold queer fairy tales. At the end of each story, the fairy godmother or queen turns to the princess and says, "Would you like to hear my history?" Of course, in the resulting tale, she is the princess, and so on.

I was only beginning to come out when I read it. I didn't know any queer adults and the vast majority of my media exposure to queerness had been through learning about AIDS and the AIDS quilt: a legacy of love, but also of death. Kissing the Witch planted a seed for me, an idea that queerness might instead mean a kind of interconnectedness I hadn't felt before, a way of locating myself in relationship to a past and present far larger than only me.

Stories are, at their core, an attempt to understand what matters: how we--our choices, our very existence--matter. We use stories to define ourselves as individuals and as communities, use stories to control and liberate, to welcome and challenge and explore and escape. That's a gift and a responsibility.

Another element here is the topic of gay, lesbian, and questioning characters coming to terms with their sexuality. Beyond the obvious, what points do you hope readers will draw regarding sexuality and the desire to belong?

I read the play Closer by Patrick Marber when I was in high school. One character greets her intimates with "Hello, stranger." That affectation imprinted on me: a curiosity about how we construct the stranger and how we encounter them. How do they become something more than a stranger?

Our society uses sexuality to create otherness, along with gender, race, religion, etc. We split ourselves into groupings of "us" and "them." I'm interested, on a personal level: How can we deconstruct that sense of otherness? How can we move closer to one another and become less alone?

Becks's story explores some of the ways we internalize otherness (being a stranger to ourselves), and the other characters' stories offer an extended exploration of that question of how we find belonging, despite being strangers to one another and ourselves.

You include many references to Judaism. What parallels are you hoping to draw between Judaism and the worlds you created?

I am Jewish, so everything I write is shaped by Jewish ways of thinking about the world: a commitment to conversation and debate and questioning; a deep rooting in connection to the past; an appreciation for ritual's power to connect us across time and space; a sense of belonging that repudiates isolationism. These ideas are elemental to my own--Jewish--way of engaging with the world and self. I can't imagine writing a book untouched by Jewish values.

What are your favorite works of speculative fiction? Favorite authors? Did any particular works influence this book?

I'm a chaotic, omnivorous reader! The books that most influenced me sit on what my wife and I call the "Portia Shelf," books with braided timelines, or some kind of structural play: Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, Violet Kupersmith's Build Your House Around My Body. Books that have, at their center, a question, and which explore that question through layered, interwoven characters and events.

I was also influenced by the text-based game Photopia by Adam Cadre. It's a game that skillfully plays with ideas of agency and genre and storytelling. --Michael Magras