There is a curious lack of tension in Awake in the Floating City that grows curiouser as the book goes on; we are always waiting for something to happen, for some event to shake up the foundations of Bo’s world. Yet the only movement is the inexorable forward creep of time, of age, of water, of mold—and the yearning backward pull of memory, not quite strong enough to stop the decline or even delay it ... Awake in the Floating City is troubled by some of the same problems that plague many books about fictional artworks; describing a thing that is supposedly sublime is always difficult for the writer who sees it clearly in their mind’s eye and the reader, who cannot ... Nevertheless, the book asks haunting questions about the ability of art to contain or transmit memory. The results are also indicative of a turn away from solution-oriented speculative fiction toward a different kind of warning—of how we might live with an end that is already in progress.
Elegiac ... Kwan nimbly constructs a dystopic San Francisco populated by the leftover few. Impermanence is delicately threaded throughout—disappearing landscapes, buildings, landmarks, records, archives. But Kwan also deftly intertwines centuries of Asian American history.
With a gentle poeticism, Awake in the Floating City explores the gifts and trials of an intergenerational friendship while also reminding us of the personal stories we carry inside, and the multitude of histories embedded in the land around us. For anyone whose past is populated with long-gone landmarks in altered landscapes, Awake in the Floating City will strike a resonant chord.
Bo and Mia’s stories ask readers to see how grief, loss, and change affect people’s decisions while also challenging them to look at climate change from a very personal perspective. Readers of Eric Barnes’ Above the Either (2019) and Lily Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirate (2022) will relish this thought-provoking debut.
Marvelously graceful ... While this gem sits firmly between the mushrooming genre of climate fiction and the more subdued melancholia of Station Eleven or The Dog Stars, it’s very much its own creature, meditating with fresh eyes on the resilience of memory and the inevitability of time.
In spare and sometimes enigmatic prose, Kwan offers weighty insights into the human condition ... Unfortunately, the plot is too leisurely paced, and Bo’s relationship with a married man named Eddie feels somewhat superfluous and underdeveloped. Still, readers of climate fiction such as Téa Obreht’s The Morningside will find much to enjoy.
