Portia Elan says a colleague’s remark about John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” set her on the path to writing her debut novel, “Homebound.”
Elan, then a brand-new public school teacher, recalls her fellow first-year instructor Brenda Rivera comparing the community in Steinbeck’s novel to the ecosystem of a tide pool. And something clicked.
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“She said, ‘All the characters are holding their own little corner of the tide pool – fulfilling their own roles within the ecosystem’,” Elan recalls. “I’ve thought about that probably at least four or five times a week since she said that to me almost a decade ago.”
The idea of individual impacts driving ecosystem change fuels much of Elan’s “Homebound,” out May 5 from Scribner. In it, Elan writes through the eyes of multiple characters across time and space to explore connection, identity, found family and what a future on this planet might hold for us.
There’s Becks, a grief-stricken teenage girl exploring early computer game programming in 1983, all the way to Yesiko, a mercenary captain steering her ship laden with smuggled goods across a flooded Earth in the year 2586. In between, we see letters from Tamar, a biologist and inventor struggling with the ethically questionable decisions of her technocratic boss, and the inner thoughts of Chaya, a sentient automaton.
The connection between these characters and timelines begins with a text-based computer game called “Homebound.” Created by Becks’s beloved uncle, it’s completed by Becks as she mourns his passing, grapples with her queer identity and navigates conflict in her relationships with her mother and best friend.
In the game, an astronaut on a deep-space mission to free a generation ship must make a series of choices in order to save the lives of everyone on board. As the timeline skips back and forth, from character to character, Elan shows us the power of storytelling in surviving through eons of change and shaping lives lived hundreds of years from now.
This interview has been edited for lenght and clarity.
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Q. You started out as a writer of poetry; how did you find your way to writing futuristic science fiction?
My MFA is in poetry, and that’s mostly what I wrote through my mid-20s. Then I actually stopped writing altogether while I worked as a high school teacher, because that’s a job that requires so much of one’s heart and mind. When I became a public librarian, I found I had time and space to write again – but at that point, I wasn’t reading a lot of poetry. I was reading a lot of novels.
I’m a pretty omnivorous reader, but I think the books that most sparked that excitement to sit down and write my own stories were “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell, “How High We Go in the Dark” by Sequoia Nagamatsu, and the interwoven fairy tales in Emma Donoghue’s “Kissing the Witch.” I was also inspired by “People of the Book” by Geraldine Brooks – the kind of books that leap from time to time, where, as a reader, you might have to do a little bit of work to understand the connections between the gaps.
Q. The book is written from different characters’ perspectives. Whose point of view did you think of first?
I was part of some online writing groups during the pandemic. In one of them, we had a prompt to write a character’s pet peeves. I almost immediately found the voice of this spiky, annoyed teenager, with a vulnerability under her prickliness. I was interested in that vulnerability, so I started following her voice, and in the book, she became Becks.
Becks’s big question, and mine for large parts of my life, was, “How do I find where I belong?” In writing Becks, it became clear to me that the answer to that question was much bigger than any one individual story could hold, because there are actually a lot of answers. So the book was going to require an expansiveness, and the kind of leaping between perspectives that I so enjoy as a reader.
Q. What environmental themes did you draw on in coming up with the flooded Earth of the future in “Homebound?”
While I definitely exaggerated what’s possible in terms of sea level rise, I did do research into some of the consequences of climate change. That’s where I came upon the term “ecovillages.” They’re intentional communities that exist on every continent, and their focus is on ways of living that are in harmony with their ecosystems and natural environments. Their farming practices, harvesting practices and building practices don’t detract from the health of the land and the animals around them.
I spent quite a bit of time reading about those communities, some of them even here in California near where I live. I learned about closed-loop systems like aquaponics, because I was interested in portraying them in the future setting of “Homebound.” That future world is a dystopia, but I didn’t invent any human cruelties – debt collection, drug dealing, walling off borders – that don’t already exist today. That felt important.
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Q. Are you a gamer? Is there anything that you learned about early video games that surprised you?
I’m not a die-hard gamer. I played some computer games growing up: The Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I played Super Mario Bros. at a friend’s house, but I’ve never actually owned a game console myself. But I really like the idea that a game is a collaborative story – that the player is a part of telling the story that the game designer sets out to create.
Text-based games are quite intimate because they ask a player to do so much imagining. I was interested in that kind of a relationship to story, as opposed to a more graphic interface where you have a joystick or a controller, and you’re a little bit outside of the game.
When I was doing research on early text-based games, I was surprised and delighted by the ways that they could become almost authorless, in that the code would be shared, then somebody might iterate on it or evolve it or change it, and then pass that code along. Games evolved from person to person. They weren’t yet being produced by EA or a big production studio – they were being written by some guy, and then shared to another person, and then shared to another person. There was a kind of communal ownership that was really interesting to me.
Q. In the “Homebound” future, some religious traditions have also survived the passage of time. Can you talk about that?
Religion is one of the ways that we pass down stories, so it can provide a sense of continuity between the past, the present and what comes after us. I think we need ways of feeling that we’ve inherited from and connected to those who have come before us, and that our stories are a part of something bigger that will continue on after us. I am Jewish, and so what I write is shaped by a commitment to conversation and an appreciation for rituals. Religion is just one of the storytelling threads that binds us and helps us reject isolationism.
Q. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you wish that I had?
I always want somebody to ask what my cats’ names are! We have three cats: Little Bear, who is actually sitting in my lap right now, Ripley and Bluett.