Alive with mad inventions, scientific breakthroughs, a wicked sense of play, and a commitment to finding reasons not to let ourselves feel “alienated and alone in a cold, incomprehensible cosmos,” this ambitious debut dazzles, touches, surprises, and sometimes exhausts. Johnson, a professor of physics and contributor to top SF magazines, conjures a singular bildungsroman narrated by John, the brilliant but isolated son of a physicist. John’s father runs a cyclotron in a sewer, injects caged lizards with a potential anti-tumor serum, and harbors a big secret that John’s mother and Trotskyite sister suspects is an affair. Despite the novel’s buoyant humor and pervasive wildness—expect chimps and giants, circus life and Los Alamos secrets, mirror neurons and a probability pump—real human feeling is Johnson’s throughline, as John’s family faces episodic misadventures and, eventually, heart-rending loss that even science can’t fix.

The family material constituting the novel’s first third is a marvel of domestic SF, deftly blending last-century Americana with gee-whiz kid’s-adventure enthusiasm, creature-feature consequences, surprises both pleasing and dark, and dead-serious acknowledgement of the destructive powers of nature and the frailty of human life. John’s father is both brilliant and reckless, the classic archetype, and the disasters that his family faces—all written with brisk elan—pulse with humor and invention. That’s true even of tragic beats, as when someone John loves becomes a “walking, talking nucleo-chemical time bomb.” John’s maturation and separation from the clan finds the comic energy fading, somewhat, though Johnson still springs daft surprises (one favorite: a chimp’s academic career). As John loves and experiences fresh loss, the story’s darker undercurrents become ever more urgent.

Lovers of thoughtful, humane science fiction steeped in weird science will feast, though the novel’s daunting length and lack of narrative momentum may keep readers from discovering the pleasures and startling insights within. Chapters tend to be paced like short stories, introducing and exploring a new, strange scenario and then wringing it, with crisp efficiency, for all its resonance.

Takeaway: Thrillingly inventive novel of growing up the son of a mad scientist.

Comparable Titles: Nick Harkaway, Lauren Beukes.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-