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.

From Bluesky:

Reading METALLIC REALMS by @thelincoln.bsky.social right now and this is just my jam. It's like Nabakov's PALE FIRE mixed with fanfic.

Finished this yesterday and I loved this book. I wish it had been five times longer, I would have devoured it just as happily.

Will add to the Nebula Recommended Reading list when I get the chance.

This was everything that I wanted from the scifi genre and was really enjoying the concept of this. The plot had that element that I was looking for and enjoyed how good everything was in this. The characters were everything that I was looking for and enjoyed going on this journey with them. Lincoln Michel has a strong writing style and was glad I got to read this.

When you read *Metallic Realms* by Lincoln Michel, you experience multiple stories in one. The premise follows our narrator, who chronicles the writings and inner workings of a collective made up of his roommates and their friends.

As a result, readers are treated to episodic sci-fi adventures while also gaining insight into the lives and inspirations of the writers. These authors are struggling 30-somethings living in NYC. Michael, the narrator, is somewhat of an outsider, looking in on their world. While he may provide reliable accounts of the sci-fi stories, he lacks self-awareness and serves as an unreliable narrator when it comes to the behind-the-scenes/interpersonal aspects.

I love the back-and-forth dynamic in this book. It gives me obsessive fan/ *Misery* vibes combined with the unreliable narration and justifications found in *Yellowface*. I was hooked right from the introduction and highly recommend this unique, genre-defying read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for this unbelievable ARC.

Thank you NetGalley and Atria Books for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

I have only read one Vladimir Nabokov novel and that is Pale Fire. I enjoyed it and its layers upon layers of unreliability quite a lot when I read it in my senior year of high school, but I don't think I quite got it. Metallic Realms is like if you took the idea of Pale Fire and got rid of some of the layers and made it about unsuccessful writers in Brooklyn who write sci-fi together.

The novel takes the form of a fictional novel that an outsider to this sci-fi group, Michael, is writing that combines the groups short stories and his recollection of events of their rise and fall. The novel's triumph is Michael, who might be one of the most well realized sympathetic villain, I've ever read. For that i what Michael is in many ways he is the villain of this novel. He is obsessive and narcissistic. He commits a couple crimes throughout the novel and ruins the life of many of the group members in an attempt at keeping them together. Yet even as he does these terrible things you just have such pity and sympathy for him. He feels so real, like a guy who is just a little to oblivious to be able to live a nice life.

The short stories throughout the novel are also doing a very good job at what they are trying to do. As the group degrades and starts fighting more they put a lot of their anger with each other into their short stories, they proceed to get more autobiographical as they go on. Each of the group members has their own style which comes through the various short stories. Its just really marvelous work by Lincoln Michel and I highly suggest this novel for anyone looking for a tale with complex characters.