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An intriguing puzzle box of a novel, the story unfolds around three strong women, each coping with her own sense of grief. At the outset, in 1983, there\u2019s\u00a0Becks, a prickly 19-year-old student mourning the death of her uncle, Benjamin, who instilled in her a love of coding and games in the early days of computer programming.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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U.S. cover of \u201cHomebound\u201d by Portia Elan.<\/p>\n
Scribner![\"Portia]()
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Portia Elan\u2019s novel, \u201cHomebound,\u201d with its U.K. cover, on her writing desk in her Oakland home.<\/p>\n
Giselle Garza Lerma\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
From there, Elan jumps forward six centuries to Yesiko, a fiercely independent sea captain who\u2019s reckoning with the declining health of her only human companion for decades, her crewman Root.<\/p>\n
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Bridging the two timelines is Tamar, an experimental biologist at UC Berkeley in the year 2078. While grieving the loss of a beloved mentor, she begins work on a project that would use robots to help stave off ecological destruction. One of her research subjects, an android called Chaya\u00a0becomes central to connecting the plot points as their sentience grows. (Chaya refers to themself by the plural pronoun \u201cwe\u201d and sounds \u201clike a chorus of voices speaking all together,\u201d Elan writes.)<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of writing the book was about that question of loneliness, and how do we become less lonely?\u201d Elan said. \u201cFor me, that question is never going to be solved in one individual lifetime. The answer to the loneliness of the human condition requires reaching backward and forward, so the book had to include that.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an ambitious undertaking, especially for writer who considers the English author David Mitchell\u2019s Booker Prize-shortlisted third novel, \u201cCloud Atlas,\u201d to be her urtext.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Elan uses her characters\u2019 emotional struggles as the solid, recognizable foundation on which to build up their imagined worlds, a decision that impressed her former writing teacher, Rachael Herron, who in 2023 began seeing early pages of the manuscript that would become \u201cHomebound.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, (this story) is about fragmentation versus family,\u201d said Herron, a USA Today-bestselling author of more than 30 books, referencing the deep social and online divides that plague modern society. \u201cEveryone nowadays can often despair around this fragmentation, but Portia wrote this book about building deep, true found family and how (these bonds) leave echoes that affect the direct future and then the far-off future.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Portia Elan, author of \u201cHomebound,\u201d in her home office in Oakland, on April 17.<\/p>\n
Giselle Garza Lerma\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
Critically, throughout their poignant narratives, each of Elan\u2019s characters engages with the advancements and limitations of the technologies available at the time, influenced by her upbringing in Palo Alto with mechanical engineering professors for parents.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a mix of subject matters that Elan\u2019s publishing team hopes will have wide appeal, as \u201cHomebound\u201d releases in the same week in both the U.S., Canada and the U.K.<\/p>\n
\u201cReaders and publishers are more open than ever to genre and world-building and sci-fi,\u201d Elan\u2019s agent, Julie Barer, told the Chronicle via email. \u201cI knew I could send \u2018Homebound\u2019 to someone who had never played a video game or watched \u2018Star Trek,\u2019 and they would still find something to connect to and love.\u201d<\/p>\n
By taking a long view of history in her novel, one that telescopes forward and back in time, Elan remains hopeful about how humanity might make use of the technologies at hand.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt feels a little scary to me to think about how change is happening fast right now, but then I remember that there has always been what felt like unprecedented, disruptive change\u00a0\u2014 not always for the good, not always without cost,\u201d she said. \u201cBut as living organisms, we have always survived it. And I wrote this book because I needed to figure out what would happen to these characters and how they were going to be OK.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hannah Bae is a freelance writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Portia Elan\u2019s debut novel \u201cHomebound\u201d spans centuries, blending grief, technology and the search for human connection in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[329,647,143,145,144],"class_list":["post-297320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-books","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}