Friendship means supporting each other’s endeavors and tolerating each other’s respective quirks—even if those quirks contribute to the destruction of your writing group. In Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel, friendship becomes fuel for fandom, but it is also weaponized. The narrator, Michael Lincoln (we’ll talk about the name inversion later), calls himself the Senior Lore Keeper of the writing collective the Orb 4. Alternating between the Orb 4’s science fiction short stories and his own analysis of their work, Michael guides his reader through a monograph of what he believes is a masterpiece in the history of Science Fiction—nay, all of literature: The Star Rot Chronicles.
On his Substack Counter Craft, author Lincoln Michel describes Metallic Realms as Pale Fire meets Star Trek:
“It’s a satire about publishing and the (wannabe) artistic life. A treatise on science fiction and the ‘literary or genre’ debates. A cosmic space opera. A tale of friendship. A comic Künstlerroman. And, frankly, a bit of an odd (anti?) autofiction novel in which many aspects of my own life have been remixed, distorted, or laid bare.”
The autofictional element of the text is altogether fascinating. Michael Lincoln is an inversion of Lincoln Michel, and the author even makes an appearance in the text—after Michael is accused of writing Star Rot fanfiction, he points out that it was written by the very-real Lincoln Michel, “another author, albeit one of minimal talent and even more minimal success.” But Michael’s comments on fiction and creating art deeply resonate for their authenticity—perhaps because they’re not unlike similar sentiments that Lincoln has previously explored.
Michael was drawn to SF as a child because school was hard and kids were mean, but “What did I care of earthly torments when galaxies of adventure awaited me in the pages of my library books?” When Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras, the leader of the writing collective, laments that he doesn’t have anything to show for his life and questions, “Is this what the spark of human consciousness is about?” Michael answers: “Art makes it all worthwhile even if only one person is touched by the artist’s creation. I know all this. Because your art has done that for me.”
This gut-punching honesty gives Metallic Realms its soul. That’s essential because Michael, as a narrator, is a lot to handle. He’s off-putting in the most hilarious ways: He is the Orb 4’s number one fan and misguidedly believes he is chronicling one of the greatest works in literature, but he also describes his unibrow as “luxurious eyebrows forming a unified line of defense across my forehead” and is drowning in credit card debt. He equally loves Taras and envies him for his literary accomplishments, even if Taras feels like he has fallen short. And because he closely follows the personal lives and melodramas of the Orb 4’s members (Taras, Darya, Merlin, and Jane) via a hidden microphone in a fern pot, he’s capable of deeply intrusive meddling to serve his own ends.
The reader can track those melodramas in each of the stories in The Star Rot Chronicles, which are both grounded in SF tropes and reflective of the personal dramas each of the members face. Michael says that SF reflects our present reality, and I felt that deeply by the time I reached the novel’s end—the thin veneer of academic analysis at the beginning of Metallic Realms steadily evolves into an examination of what it means to make anything creative when life conspires against us. SF is a form of escapism and joy for Taras and Michael, and it’s one of the foundations of their childhood friendship—but Michael’s fanaticism also bleeds into the Orb 4’s willingness to take advantage of him and his weirdness. While Metallic Realms is described as an “inventive romp through realms real and unreal,” it’s also heartbreaking: Michael’s motivation to capture The Star Rot Chronicles and the Orb 4’s is grounded in an unconditional love for his friendship with Taras, to the point that it destroys his career prospects, livelihood, and social life. (He leans into that destruction, but still.) Michael is unlikeable and, in some ways, unredeemable, but he’s also loveable and tragic, which makes his eccentricities fascinating to follow on the page.
The turn at the novel’s end is sudden, albeit foreshadowed, and a part of me would have loved to have spent more time with this narrative shift to observe the person Michael becomes. In comparison to the members of the Orb 4 he so closely follows (except “pretentious” Jane-with-the-MFA), Michael occasionally feels like a caricature of himself—an over-the-top and delusional fanatic who is also a deeply loyal friend. The moments of realness are refreshing and grounding. But, at the same time, that doesn’t follow the conceit of Metallic Realms—it’s meant to preserve The Star Rot Chronicles for posterity, and the final story is pure wish-fulfillment for Michael (which, again, made it tragic).
Metallic Realms is a genre-bending examination of friendship, obsession, and creativity that moves between SF, autofiction, and experimental literature with clear intent. I left this book feeling both assured of the future of storytelling and lamenting the realities of writing fiction today. But, as Michael says:
“Doesn’t this only make the Orb 4’s achievements all the more impressive? That in the face of political disintegration, climate change, mounting debt, and a shredded safety net they fought to create a vision of the future? They looked into the void and decided to fill it with art?”
Publisher: Atria
Publication date: May 13, 2025
Reviewed by Rebecca Paredes
Rebecca Paredes is a writer from Lake Elsinore, California, where the IHOP is located next to the graveyard. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Barren Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, Mosaic, and other publications. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Texas Tech University and is currently working on a linked collection of short stories inspired by her hometown.