An intense and thoughtful time-travelling dystopian fantasy where three individuals, psychically linked through time, fight enslavement, exploitation, and environmental collapse. A great read for fans of Emily St. John Mandel.

In 2106, Maida Sun possesses the ability to see the entire history of any object she touches. When she starts a job with a cultural recovery project in San Francisco with other psions like her, she discovers a teacup that connects her with Li Nuan, a sex-traffificked girl in a 1906 Chinatown brothel, and with Nathan, a tech-designer and hedonist of 2006.

A chance encounter with a prominent political leader reveals to Maida his plan to contain everyone with psionic abilities, eliminate their personal autonomy, and use their skills for his own gain. Maida is left with no choice but to join a fight she doesn’t feel prepared for, with flashes of the past, glimpses of the future and a band of fellow psions as her only tools. She must find a way to stop this agenda before it takes hold and destroys life as she knows it. Can the past give Maida the key to saving her future?

My Review:

This is a hard book to characterize, and even more difficult to sum up in just a few – or even a few dozen – pithy phrases. But I’m certainly going to try.

A big part of that difficulty is that it isn’t just one story. It’s three stories that are loosely linked – even though that’s not obvious at the beginning – centered around three individuals who do not know what they have to do with each other any more than the reader does.

They’re also not experiencing the same thing – or even the same sort of thing, although the first and third are closer in that particular than either of them would ever imagine.

But there is one thing that they share from the beginning. All of their stories, all of their histories and hopes and dreams, take place in San Francisco, a place that has carried the hopes and dreams of so very many since long before the city boomed during the California Gold Rush.

In 1906, Li Nuan, 16 years old, sold by her parents into slavery, forced into sex work, whose very existence is proof that slavery was not eradicated by the Civil War, is ‘in service’ to one of the Tong bosses who ‘owned’ pre-Earthquake Chinatown. And the earthquake is coming, the end of the world as Li Nuan knows it. But she’s seeing visions of the quake, the fire that follows, and the death and destruction that results. And those visions have told her that she can seize the freedom she yearns for in the chaos – if she’s willing to do whatever it takes to claim it.

Nathan Zhao in 2006, an up-and-coming tech designer, is busy living his very good life without taking too much care for the consequences to the world he lives on. He’s a good man, a good person, he’s got a great job, is in a happy long-term relationship with his boyfriend, they’re free to be openly gay – which he knows is a privilege – and life is, well, good. The vision that he gets, both of Li Nuan’s past and of the environmental destruction to come in his near future, opens his eyes and sets his life on a different course than he’d originally planned.

The reason that both Li Nuan and Nathan are having these life-changing visions is Maida Sun. Maida is a historian and more importantly, is gifted with psychometry in a future where a significant minority of the population has been gifted with psionic powers of one stripe or another. Maida can see the past of any object she touches, and she’s working on a cultural reclamation project in the ruins of what her post-apocalyptic society calls ‘The Precursor Era’. In other words, us.

And that’s where all the links get filled in – and pushed out into the future. Nathan and his friends buried a time capsule in 2006, a capsule that is uncovered as part of the project Maida is working on. In that capsule, along with photos, memorabilia, a few personal items and a bit of outright junk, is a jade tea cup from the mid-19th century. A cup that passed through Li Nuan’s hands, down the generations to her great-grandson Nathan, and into that box only to emerge a century later under the hands – and into the powers – of Nathan’s great-great-niece, Maida.

At a point where Maida’s post-apocalyptic world is on the cusp of descending into the dystopia they initially avoided. But only will continue to do so at this terrible, hopeful juncture if Maida can seize her day and her freedom as decisively as her ancestor Li Nuan did hers.

Escape Rating A-: This is one of those stories that made me think pretty much all the thoughts and feel like it brought up all the readalikes. Which is only fair as it’s not one story but three stories and they aren’t as similar as one might expect in a single book.

At the same time, it did feel as if all the stories revolved around the idea of ‘carpe diem’, even though the days that each person in the change needed to seize were very different. Still, when they each grabbed hold of that day out of hope for the future, they each moved the story forward into the hope that they reached out for.

A virtuous circle rather than the vicious cycle that begins each of their stories.

Li Nuan’s story is the most harrowing – not surprising considering the conditions under which she was brought to California. Nathan is honestly having a lot of fun in his part of the story – at least until he sees that his world is not only due for a great big fall – but a fall that he’s likely to live to see and and can’t continue his own personal revel toward the cliff even if he can’t do much to fix the wider world.

But the story is centered in Maida Sun’s early 21st century post-apocalypse. Initially her world seems filled with hope of a brighter day for everyone – even if most people are still cursing the ‘Precursors’ (meaning US) for leaving such a big damn mess to clean up.

Still, the human side of Maida’s world is filled with hope. The ‘Collapse’ of the Precursor civilization in the 2050s, the climatic changes, the wars and death and destruction that followed, set humanity up for a more cooperative future – with the help of the great ‘Bloom’ of auroras that surrounded the planet and gave rise to psionic powers among a percentage of the population.

But by Maida’s 2106, the new normal has been normal long enough, and the devastation of the collapse is just far enough back in time and memory, that some people are starting to think that the ‘good old days’ were better than they were – at least for THEIR sort of people. Whatever that might mean. And, because humans are STILL gonna be human, there’s always someone just watching and waiting to take advantage of that impulse. By creating a new scapegoat, giving a new generation someone to hate and fear, and telling as many big lies as they can to weaponize society so that a new authoritarian regime can rise and start the whole terrible cycle all over again.

It’s hard to miss the historical parallels, because the playbook being used is old and familiar and all the more frightening for being followed right this very minute. What gives Down in the Sea of Angels its hopeful ending is that Maida Sun and the psions are finally living in a time when more people seem to want the world to get better for everyone – or alternatively that she and the psion community have the truth on their side and the opportunity to nip the forces of regression, repression and evil in the bud before the tide has turned completely in their favor.

More than a few of all of those thoughts I mentioned at the top before I close. One of the reasons this story worked as well as it did is that San Francisco is a bit of a liminal place and its history as well as its reputation for being a bit ‘out there’ for multiple definitions of that phrase fit the story. (For an entirely different fantasy featuring San Francisco’s liminality take a look at Passing Strange by Ellen Klages.)

Maida’s particular early 22nd century was fascinating because it didn’t follow the usual patterns for post-apocalyptic stories – or at least there was clearly a delay between the apocalypse and the dystopia – or we missed the first wave of dystopia and this is the attempt of a second dystopia to take hold. It’s a very different post-apocalyptic vision from either The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed or The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow and the contrasts are quite interesting.

As much as the rising tide of authoritarianism in Maida’s time resembles both the rise of Nazi Germany AND the present political situation in the United States, the way that the anti-psion sentiment is created and promoted by the powers-that-be owes more than a bit, in the fictional sense at least, to the anti-mutant sentiment in the X-Men movie series.

I’ll confess that I picked this up because I absolutely adored the author’s debut novel, The Circus Infinite – and I was hoping to get a similar feeling from this book. In the end I did enjoy Down in the Sea of Angels very much, but not quite as much as Circus, and I think that’s because of the split story lines and how long it took them to figure out that they were part of each other. Howsomever, I did absolutely love the audio narration by Eunice Wong, and it was lovely to hear her voice again, telling me a marvelous story.