Before and after the flood
Homebound
by Portia Elan
Toronto: Scribner Canada, 2026
$26.99 / 9781668206225
Reviewed by Zoe McKenna
*
Homebound by Portia Elan manages to be many things: nostalgic, futuristic, tragic, tender, and above all, a startlingly moving debut.
Portia Elan is a recent graduate of the University of Victoria’s MFA program. Elan is a writer, teacher, and librarian, and, as such, is perfectly positioned to pen a story about the transformational power of storytelling.
When readers first meet nineteen-year-old Becks, she is in the throes of grief. It’s 1983, and Becks is a budding computer coder. This skill, electric with potential that she cannot possibly predict, is her last tie to her late uncle. Uncle Ben saw Becks more clearly than she did herself—an outcast, intelligent, sensitive, punk, and, to Becks’ surprise, queer. With Ben gone, Becks spends her days butting heads with her mother as they both contend with her grandmother’s fading mind. Without her uncle at her side, Becks is truly unmoored.
Then, in Ben’s room, Becks discovers a collection of floppy discs labelled with her name. On them is the beginning of a new computer game, a collection of ideas of where the narrative might go, and a final goodbye with a parting request: finish building the game.
Becks, lost in the in-between space of high school, lonely beyond description, throws herself into the video game. With each new line of code, Becks begins to stitch herself back together. What she doesn’t know is that the story she’s telling will ripple through time for centuries.
Lieutenant California Solo, the determined space-travelling protagonist of Becks’ video game, Homebound, touches the lives of countless people. Tamar, a scientist in the 2090s, reflects fondly on the game and the instructor who introduced it to her as she works in the lab responsible for Ayes, a new type of automaton. Four hundred years later, Yesiko, a roughened sea captain, sails the oceans in search of salvage to sell when she meets Chaya, one of Tamar’s Ayes, who tells her the story of California Solo and alters Yesiko’s life forever. On the surface, these characters could not be more different, but they are united by Solo’s adventure through the stars.
Homebound spans hundreds of years and five protagonists. It has every opportunity to become muddy or unwieldy, but it always remains razor-sharp. Becks’ experience entering the queer punk scene in the 1980s couldn’t be more different from Yesiko’s time at sea selling salvage to pay off debts.
As a novel, Homebound is as eclectic as its characters. There are chapters told entirely in email, sequences of code, and opportunities to dive headfirst into the Homebound video game as readers follow Lieutenant Solo on her journey. This mix of approaches works excellently. In stories with many shifting perspectives, it’s common to feel a little disappointed when a favourite character’s chapter ends, and the narrative moves on to someone new. Homebound avoids this entirely. Each chapter was a treat, and every character had something to say that I was eager to hear.
Just as California Solo defies the constraints of her position as Lieutenant to embark on the journey that inspired so many, Homebound transcends all genre categorization to become something special and unforgettable. Labelled as literary science fiction, Elan takes markers of the genre—robots, computers, space travel—and turns them on their head. Homebound offers both earnest nostalgia and a clear-eyed look ahead to a future where technology is neither wholly good nor evil, but simply a tool wielded by both well-meaning and self-serving people, for better or worse.
What’s compelling about Elan’s imagining is how tightly linked the future is to the past—not through war, environmental crises, or any matter of dystopian circumstance we tend to envision, but through stories. In many ways, the most distant future Elan imagines, steered by Yesiko and her crew in 2586, feels both the most historical and the most impacted by Lieutenant Solo’s story. This cyclical feeling is comforting. Though some things change, so much stays the same.
It is in ways like these that Homebound is so bittersweet. It’s raw, tragic, and fearful to a degree that’s sometimes difficult to look at, and has a sneaking vulnerability that draws you in bit by bit until it is nearly too much to bear. Yet, more often, it is earnest, hopeful, and intensely heartfelt. Homebound is clearly a story about stories, but more than that, it’s a story about love.
Let’s be clear: this is not a gentle story about the delicate connections between us. The love in these pages—between friends, family, community, and yes, even for ourselves—is fierce. It is the bravery to venture out in search of community. It is passion for your craft. It is opening a calloused heart to new friends. It is a vulnerable confession met with ridicule. It is defiance of the status quo. It is love so unrelenting and unmerciful in the face of death that it needs an outlet to be endured. Becks’ video game is born out of this love. Hundreds of years later, aboard her dilapidated ship, Yesiko never actually plays Homebound. Yet, Becks’ love for her uncle, carried through the centuries by people who recognized their own feelings in hers, remains so palpable that it not only moves Yesiko, it changes her.
Calling a book profound feels trite. It’s a tired word for remarkable works. Yet, in considering Homebound, it is hard to find another term quite so fitting. Certainly, Homebound moved me more than anything I’ve read in a long while, and I know it will stay with me for a long time to come. I welcome that.
*
Zoe McKenna received a MA from the UVic and a BA from VIU. Her research focuses on horror writing, with a focus on stories by women. She was the Assistant Editor of That Witch Whispers and her writing has also appeared inBlack Cat, Malahat Review, and Quill & Quire. When not at her desk, Zoe can be found haunting local bookstores and hiking trails. Zoe gratefully acknowledges that she is a guest on the traditional territory of the Puneluxutth (Penelakut) and the hul’qumi’num-speaking peoples. Find her on Twitter. [Editor’s note: Zoe McKenna has reviewed recent books by Archer Campbell, Whitney French, Adam Parker, Emily Paxman, Guojing, Deni Ellis Béchard, W.K. Shephard, Ron Prasad, Peter Darbyshire, Richard Van Camp, Nalo Hopkinson, Marcus Kliewer, Ivana Filipovich, Giselle Vriesen, and Scott Alexander for BCR.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster