Sadly I had to DNF this about 30% in. Some of that is Hurley on me as I can see it is well written and does have an interesting concept. I could never really get a grasp of the story though and the characters felt too flat for me to try to push through.

I have decided to DNF this book about halfway through. I think that is on me, though, and that there is an audience for this one.

I was pulled in by both the cover and some of the quick tag lines I saw. I expected a sci-fi book with humor, similar to The Martian. This was quite different.

Metallic Realms is literary and sci-fi and satire, a set of somewhat interconnected short stories that share characters and theme...

That was just too much for me. I think if the focus and scope had been narrowed down, it would have done more justice to the content and been more enjoyable for the reader. While the text is engaging and the setting is well developed, and I quickly got a sense of where the novel was going, it kept turning and turning and turning until I gave up. It felt like the old adage, too many cooks in the kitchen. I couldn't hold on to the various ideas and found myself caring less and less.

There was some charm that comes from the general nerdiness of the characters, but weird books still have to be engaging and this one didn't do it for me.

METALLIC REALMS is a celebration of the unreliable narrator, a paean to and takedown of “fandom,” and a gleeful tour-de-force spinning dizzily across sci-fi genres. The narrator is named Michael Lincoln*, at one point pizza is deployed as a weird alien tongue in order to stop an argument?, and the book features the best use of footnotes since THE EXTINCTION OF IRENA REY. Watching Michael Lincoln’s obsession with his roommate’s writing collective metastasize from unhinged to straight-up criminal is deeply satisfying, and also there’s snark about muji pens.

*no relation to author Lincoln Michel

I wanted to like this novel so badly. The concept sounded so interesting and unique, but I just couldn’t get into the overall story. I found the plot rather confusing. I don’t read a lot of science fiction but I just felt lost and distracted by the crazy plot holes. Also the tone is strange and felt forced. Such a disappointment.

Props to the author for capturing a specific kind of cringe SFF fan voice that makes you want to run away within a few sentences, but manages to keep us involved through excerpts of the fiction the group was writing, and the sheer mess of drama and social ineptitude that comes with it, and it only escalates from there. If you have secondhand embarassment issues, this is not a book for you because it leans full into the cringe of our main character and the shit he does. Absolutely fascinating to watch it all ramp up though.

"Fantastic universes and personal dramas collide as a group of friends blur the line between real life and fiction with delightfully disastrous results from the acclaimed author of the "timeless and original" (The New York Times) The Body Scout.

Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln finds his life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic lives of the pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns - he has a higher calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written word: The Star Rot Chronicles.

Written collectively by Michael's best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit science fiction writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to extraterrestrial romances and interstellar wars. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished - until now.

But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest universe ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the fun house reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group's fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one mission: to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost."

Ah yes, being the keeper of the flame, the one who wallows in nostalgia. I heavily relate.

engaging set of characters and a very interesting protagonist who generally feels like not a great person. sci-fi stories ranged from great to meh. 4 stars. tysm for the arc.

Not quite what I expected. Really more of a satirical literary experiment than scifi novel - clever but but not always satisfying. There are definitely some amusing moments, and I liked the idea of a book that’s partly made up of pulpy sci-fi stories written by its characters. But the execution wore on me, mostly because the narrator’s voice intrudes on everything. I get that he’s supposed to be insufferable, but there were times when I wished he’d just let the story breathe instead of constantly inserting his overbearing analysis. Well-written, and I can see why some people love it, but I found myself wanting more actual SFF and less knowing winks at the genre.

Metallic Realms is a literary book about a group of friends who write pulpy sci-fi, with excerpts from their books found throughout. These excerpts are full of hamfisted social commentary with true to life details and jabs at their fellow writers snuck in, and they're certainly not the masterpieces our poor misguided and unreliable narrator believes them to be. Michael manages to be both earnest and sardonic and I often found myself thinking, "ugh, I've known guys like this." I felt deeply sorry for him but also couldn't stop rolling my eyes at him.

I am a sci-fi fan (and a nerd in general, if I'm being honest) myself and there are SO MANY incredibly nerdy references, many of which were tucked into the footnotes. I'm not typically a huge fan of footnotes, but I actually thought they worked really well here. I took note of this one:

"Although I've always been partial to the worldbuilding of Star Wars, I hold no truck with the recent influx of fans" who complain the franchise is now political." What do they think Wars refers to in the title!?"

As a pretty involved Star Wars fan, this conversation is INCREDIBLY topical right now. I see this being discussed daily.

I really enjoy stories about groups of creative friends and the events that inevitably lead to their dissolution. I thought this premise was really unique, and while I often found myself incredibly annoyed at the characters, overall I had a fun time reading this.

Metallic Realms is a very distinct read.

One which I can't say I ended up enjoying very much. It is trying to be too many things and isn't quite doing any of them justice. I feel the setting is good, and you quickly get a sense of the aim of the novel. But then it takes turn after turn into directions that dont make a lot of sense. I don't know if there were just too many ideas going on or just not a solid enough plot to hold them up, but things did not gel. Also note that if you can't stand ultra modern references from the current day you will not like this. Contemporary is one thing, but this is another level. I did not enjoy any of the current day references it took me out of the story completely. It's not a pleasant read. I only made it to 52%. I hope someone can enjoy it but it is difficult to recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for providing an eARC of Metallic Realms in exchange for my honest opinions.

Metallic Realms is a wild, genre-bending story filled with humor and meta-commentary about sci-fi fandom and writing groups. While the unreliable narrator and chaotic structure may be off-putting for some, its cleverness and darkly funny moments make it a unique, albeit flawed, read for fans of literary experimentation and sci-fi.

I thought this was a darkly funny and inventive tale. The ending felt like it veered into a totally different tone though, which felt jarring.

I really wanted to like this book but I just couldn't finish it. The style it was written in, and the short stories just made it hard for me to get through it. I was never invested in a plot or any characters to even give myself a push to finish.

I liked this book! the author did a good job at storytelling and describing rather than just telling. I like the themes brought out in this book, and also how the science fiction ideals were carried out. I liked reading this one!!

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

This book has some nerdy charm to it, and had me giggling at times. However, the plot really seems to drag and I did not feel invested in the characters. Weird books are hard to land, and this one just didn’t land for me. The characters were super unlikable and I did not feel invested in the group drama constantly occurring. The sci-fi short stories seemed to be trying to also make a political statement that also didn’t land.
I don’t usually review books I didn’t finish (only made it to 65%) but it wasn’t just that this book wasn’t for me, I feel that this book really lacked what it needed to keep me invested.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

copied from my goodreads review, which i have linked below:

DNF at 55%. i wouldn't usually mark one of these finished or even rate it but honestly this made me so mad & i wasted so much time trying to force myself to keep going that i felt like i needed to lmao.

frankly i'm astonished at all the glowing 5-star reviews this has so far?? all the marketing describing this as a "genre-breaking ode to golden-age scifi", the reviews calling it a "(toxic) love letter" and a "panoply of sci-fi delights"... did we even read the same book???? bc there is literally no way i would describe this thus.

i'm not convinced this author even actually likes sci-fi. the structure of this is a whole bunch of like, "critical" essays written by the protag about sci-fi short stories written by his group of friends, & i use quotations around "critical" very deliberately. i've written more thoughtful commentary about a story in middle-school book reports than we got from this. some of this is certainly because our protag is wildly delusional & unreliable beyond the telling, but he himself is not written in a way that is at all entertaining or interesting. i just hated him. he was so unbelievably obnoxious & smug & condescending. i love unreliable narrators! i love protagonists who suck! but i wanted to punch this man in the face, which is also wild bc his name is literally an analog of the book author's name. like. my dude. ANYWAY.

these "critical" essays & commentary are interspersed with the short stories his friends wrote, always tying in, in the laziest, most uninteresting way, with the real-world happenings of the characters who have written them. i kept reading as long as i did bc very rarely these would have a little spark of something in them that made me go, oh okay, maybe there is something to be found here. that would immediately get obliterated by everything else happening in these stories tho, so, you know. f me i guess.

which brings me to the quandary of deciding whether this author actually even likes the classic sci-fi he's riffing off. we have a protagonist who spends the vast majority of his time railing on the tastes of sci-fi nerds around him (including some charming diatribes about how fantasy is garbage, all while talking about how wonderful STAR WARS, OF ALL SCI-FI SERIES, IS), featuring innumerable rants about star trek (which the star rot chronicles or whateverthefuck are clearing copying). & then we have these short stories, again obviously inspired by star trek, but with all the stupid names ppl always make fun of sci-fi for having (the glorxo healthcare empire, the borj, which are in fairness in-narrative clearly rip offs of star trek's borg, with their oog, etc etc etc) & their stories that hearken back to the OG star trek episodes. like. who are we making fun of here?

if not for the fake-omelas story "the ones who much choose in el'omas" i could prbly have pushed through this till the end, but that one made me so mad (el'omas? really?) that i finished that section & have spent the last week dreading finishing this. there was a really fucking weird conversation about ~~queering sci-fi~~ that as an actual nonbinary lesbian made me deeply uncomfortable, the borg manager was a woman named ca'raan (we made her a karen? really?), the entire bit where merlin got internet canceled was just sooooooooooooo

all in all this felt like an extremely lazy, unthoughtful attempt at sparking some sort of critical conversation about sci-fi & its fans, but it also just felt so scornful throughout, with no sense of actual joy or fondness for the genre, that it left a bad taste in my mouth.

thank you to netgalley & the publisher for providing me this ARC. i wish i'd enjoyed it

I was not a massive fan of this book. To be completely blunt, it felt a bit like a millennial just whining. The main character seemed so out of touch with any sort of reality that it made the book difficult to truly enjoy, or settle into. The twist at the end kind of just made it worse for me. I will not be recommending this book.

Truly great. The writing has such a distinct and laugh-out-loud funny narrative voice. I really enjoyed this; never before have I been so eager to read footnotes.

i am exactly the kind of chronically online person this book was meant for. admittedly, i’ve never read pale fire, so i was interested to see what could possibly have earned that comp— now, after reading this, i want to read pale fire. aside from that, this was EXCELLENT. like watching a youtube video about a train about to crash— the train has already crashed, you know it will crash, and yet you spend your time desperately begging for it not to crash. but of course it always does. i could take about this book for hours. i need it to be out right now to do a book club on it. RAH!

At turns, funny and clever and downright discomforting, Lincoln Michel's Metallic Realms definitely will remind readers of the arc of Pale Fire (with a small dollop of Confederacy of Dunces) as the unreliable narrator details the work of a collective of 30-something Brooklyn writers whose stories maybe would/could/should have appeared in Kelly Link's Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.