The Charles Kinbote of Millennial Losers

Metallic Realms (Lincoln Michel, 2025)

A startling question occurred to me while reading

Lincoln Michel

’s new novel Metallic Realms: Had I ever read a book about my own generational cohort before? I surveyed the competition. Nearly everyone on my bookshelf is dead. Rachel Cusk? No. Ottessa Moshfegh is the right age, but neither Eileen or Lapvona are set in the present. Sally Rooney is the only contender, but whether it’s the Irishness or the class stuff or the archetypal romantic sweep, her characters in Normal People (the only one I’ve read, don’t yell at me!) don’t quite scan as “Millennial” to me either.

The dedication page of Metallic Realms reads “For my friends. Sorry.” The book lives up everything that “sorry” promises. Michel, born in 1982, has constructed a heat-seeking missile aimed at the over-educated, under-achieving mid-30s to early-40s set to which I unfortunately belong. The experience is thrilling and painful in equal measure, with the specificity of the references to the tv, movies, and video games our generation grew up with working double duty as punchlines and yet another twist of the knife.

Metallic Realms takes the form of a faux-scholarly collection of sci-fi stories—“The Star Rot Chronicles”—though they take up a fraction of the page-count compared to the “notes, commentary, analysis, and musings by Michael Lincoln, Foreword by Michael Lincoln, Introduction by Michael Lincoln, Afterword by Michael Lincoln, and After-Afterword by Michael Lincoln,” as the fictional title page puts it. Michel’s debt to Pale Fire is apparent, which he leans into with an epigraph from Nabokov, complete with a footnote from our fictional narrator quibbling with the wording and imploring us to keep an open mind about him despite “the outright slanders that have been spread since the tragedy.” An homage like this is, again, extremely my shit, so much so it almost reads as a threat. After just this first page, you can start to tell—if all this is clicking for you, Michel is well-positioned to get your ass somewhere down the road.

As mentioned, our narrator is Michael Lincoln, a dweeb who has failed to launch in typical Millennial fashion. Unemployed, he lives in Bushwick (rent paid by his parents) with his childhood friend Taras Castle, who writes little sci-fi stories for fun in between his real writing—it’s revealed late in the book that Taras has a novel drafted. Michael, fixated on the Star Rot Chronicles, doesn’t register they’re not Taras’ real creative focus. Mike is a blowhard and his account is blinkered in numerous ways he can’t see. Michel took a risk locking us into this character’s mind and adverb-heavy narration but he is deft at drawing out the ways Mike’s perspective departs from reality, which keeps things from getting tedious.

In Mike, Michel has undertaken a character study of a very specific but recognizable type of guy: he is smart in a technical, analytical sense—he can memorize the lore of a fictional world and pick out inconsistencies with ease—but he lacks the capacity for imaginative, expansive thinking. This gets him stuck in all kinds of mental blind alleys and pointless fixations when it comes to his interests and hobbies. But more significantly it explicates his failure to make anything of himself. Why does Mike find himself “in [his] thirties as a law school dropout living with roommates with no clear career, creative, or romantic paths” available to him?

In her review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Pauline Kael described what she saw as an odd gap in the imaginative space of science fiction:

The attraction of science fiction is that it’s an escape into an almost abstract unknown. Those who are frightened of, despairing about, or bored with this world like to turn their hopes to other worlds in space, but they’re not much interested in people. Imagination and idealism are expressed in simplified, allegorical terms. Generally speaking, when a speculative fantasy deals with human conflicts in any depth, it ceases to be called science fiction… 2001 wasn’t a pop escapist fantasy, like Star Wars; it was an attempt at a more serious view of the future, which was seen as an extension of now, a super-ordinary world. In Kubrick’s conception, there was no richness, no texture—it was all blandness. He might as well have been saying, “I have seen the future and it put me to sleep.” Spielberg’s movie is set right now, and it has none of that ponderous seriousness—but it’s the same bland now that sci-fi enthusiasts seem to think we live in. The banality is really in their view of human life.

Now obviously there’s plenty to argue against in this passage. When Kael wrote this in 1977 there was no dearth of psychologically rich science fiction, in books at least. In movies… well I’m sure we could also think of examples with a bit of effort. But Kael has Mike nailed dead to rights as the sci-fi fan who would rather live in an imagined future because of a failure on their part to find the interest in our world.

It is with this aspect of Mike’s personality that Michel opens the novel. On the very first page of Mike’s Introduction to The Star Rot Chronicles, he writes,

The ensuing tales are apt to sear into your mind more powerfully than most milestones of so-called “real life.” I close my eyes… and scenes appear as films projected on the insides of my eyelids… I can recall these moments with greater clarity than my first kiss, high school graduation, or even the tragic events of 9/11 that so defined the America of my young adulthood…

I’ll confess I occasionally ponder how my life might’ve differed if I’d never discovered The Star Rot Chronicles. Likely, I’d have finished law school. There’d be no possible warrant out for my arrest. I might have a steady job. A mortgage. A loving partner…

Pedestrian pleasures. I have another universe, and it is the Metallic Realms.

Eventually, Mike finds himself with a girlfriend, Katie, despite his best efforts to the contrary. She is obviously too good for him and has her life together in ways he profoundly does not, but she seems to accept another truism of our generation that all Millennial men start as fixer-uppers. Mike doesn’t see it this way of course. As part of Mike’s general disinterest in his own life, his narration tells us very little about Katie: she works in publishing and likes Star Trek… and that’s about it. This is correct insofar as Mike isn’t interested in people and is a low-key implicit misogynist, but I do wish Michel had found a way around him to give us a little more of her character.

But enough about Mike. Michel has written that Metallic Realms began as a lark:

In 2018, when I was at a writing residency and working on some “serious” novel or another I decided to take a break and just write a weird gonzo space opera tale for kicks. The kind of fun and funny and not-taking-itself-so-seriously SFF story I loved as a teen. I had a blast. I started drafting more of these weird space adventure tales with the same characters… I wanted to write homage-slash-pastiches of authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Italo Calvino as well as shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation that have meant so much to me.

Just as Taras writes the Star Rot Chronicles in between his “real” work, so too did Michel. The tales that made it into the book are silly and fun. They wear their inspiration so openly you have to laugh. I was cackling out loud at work when I turned the page to the next tale and read “The Ones Who Must Choose in El’Omas.” It’s so on-the-nose, so painfully close to Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s the Norm MacDonald rule of comedy that the best jokes are the ones with as little distance between set-up and punchline as possible. I love it.

Other stories include “First Contract,” which dares to ask “What if getting assimilated by the Borg actually rocked?”¹ Another, “The Duchy of Toe Adam,” I couldn’t fit to an exact author but, as it concerns two groups of religious zealots fighting brutally while holding essentially the same views, seemed to fit into the sort of Douglas Adams/Red Dwarf 70s British sci-fi milieu and its sneering, everyone-is-stupid-and-frivolous attitude that I despise (not a knock on Michel, he’s successfully pastiching something I just find unsavory). His Calvino riff, “Invisible Seas,” is an uncanny imitation of Invisible Cities; he hits that note of ambiguous beauty and unresolved grace that Calvino ends his descriptions with so perfectly.

These stories are attributed to the four eventual members of the collective collaborating on The Star Rot Chronicles. Besides Taras, we have his girlfriend Darya, a high-level cosplayer and fanfic writer; Jane Noe Johnson, an MFA student slumming it playing around in genre, and their non-binary third roommate Kast Ocampo,² who adopts the pen name SOS Merlin and is called that for the rest of the novel. Mike is not included in the circle.

If I have a complaint with Metallic Realms it’s that I wanted more tales. I wanted more Star Rot, particularly toward the end when Mike’s voice does start to wear a little thin. The tales also start to reflect the conflicts between the group members a little too closely and including a couple more that didn’t do that would have been appreciated. But I also would have liked to see more of these characters’ other writing. We get a section of Jane’s autobiographical fragment novel “The Museum of Normal Thoughts,” which is a wonderful send-up of a certain kind of aphoristic MFA writing that reaches for maximum poeticism and resonance in every single sentence (exhausting!). With the door opened to writing outside the Chronicles, it would have been nice to see an excerpt of Taras’ novel manuscript and maybe Darya’s fan fiction as well.

I need to say clearly that Metallic Realms is a very funny book. I don’t want to spoil too many of Michel’s jokes but I need to provide a couple examples. Here’s one I loved that’s also thematically and psychologically justified. At one point Mike remarks that he’s recounting from memory but he’s confident it’s accurate because he has constructed a memory palace based on Dracula’s Castle from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. This is great in its own right but my nerd ass—I love Castlevania and have played nearly all of them and can’t stop buying shitty knockoffs on the Switch (Blasphemous is good)—immediately recalled that SotN is the one where midway through you go through a mirror or whatever into the Inverted Castle where everything is upside down. Could this be intentional, I wondered, a clue that Mike isn’t as reliable a narrator as he thinks? Late in the book Michel actually pays it off when Mike realizes he might be a bit deluded and remembers the Inverted Castle!

There are also so many jokes about Star Trek throughout. Mike hates Star Trek and never misses an opportunity to trash it; but it seemed to me the great joke of the book that what he needs in his life, what would save him from being so crazy about his buddy’s stories… is Star Trek. He’s desperate for lore and worldbuilding and is practically begging Taras and company to write more stories so he can collate the new details into his story bible. Just get into Star Trek my man! You’ll be enjoying it on the “newspaper from a fictional universe” level but if that’s where you’re at there are hundreds of hours of tv and then the terrifying sprawl of the novelverse for you to work through.

Metallic Realms resonated with me deeply as an all-too-real depiction of life experiences not far off from my own. Even as I love literature and philosophy, I’ve filled my brain with all the same junk as Mike. I did live in Bushwick, with friends from college. It was hard not to picture their apartment as the flophouse Liz and I crashed at for six months that had black mold in the walls (we think) that gave me years of brain fog. And I recognize the Millennial malaise the characters suffer from—that sense that your life isn’t going anywhere and everything will only get worse, forever. Michel has managed to approach all of it with wryness and humor, has found a way to put some life into the lifelessness.

Metallic Realms is a vindication of so much that Michel has written in his newsletter over the years. Yes, your narrator should be a weird little freak. Genre-bending can be fun, generative, and powerful. Writing for your best readers is always better. It’s a testament to the power of having fun, and to the deeper meanings that playing around can bring to light.

1. extremely Seven of Nine-coded

2. Lincoln is this a reference to Kes the Ocampa from Voyager???