A- #AudioBookReview: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong

A- #AudioBookReview: Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan WongDown in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong
Narrator: Eunice Wong
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, post apocalyptic, time travel, hopepunk
Pages: 336
Length: 11 hours and 11 minutes
Published by Angry Robot, Dreamscape Lore on April 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

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.

Review: The Circus Infinite by Khan Wong

Review: The Circus Infinite by Khan WongThe Circus Infinite by Khan Wong
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Pages: 400
Published by Angry Robot Books on March 8, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

Hunted by those who want to study his gravity powers, Jes makes his way to the best place for a mixed-species fugitive to blend in: the pleasure moon. Here, everyone just wants to be lost in the party. It doesn’t take long for him to catch the attention of the crime boss who owns the resort-casino where he lands a circus job. When the boss gets wind of the bounty on Jes’ head, he makes an offer: do anything and everything asked of him, or face vivisection.
With no other options, Jes fulfills the requests: espionage, torture, demolition. But when the boss sets the circus up to take the fall for his about-to-get-busted narcotics operation, Jes and his friends decide to bring the mobster down together. And if Jes can also avoid going back to being the prize subject of a scientist who can’t wait to dissect him? Even better.

My Review:

The Circus Infinite gets off to a running start and goes at a compelling pace from that tension-filled beginning to its surprising, and very satisfying, end.

Jes Tiqualo – whose last name we don’t even know when we first meet him – is on the run while trying not to actually run through the spaceport terminal of his home planet. Not that Rijala has ever been much of a home to mixed-race Jes.

Jes is running from, well, pretty much everyone. His parents sold him to the mysterious and very shady Paragenetic Institute of the 9-Stars as a lab rat. Jes has escaped from their imprisoning Institute and is looking for a place to hide.

He picks the pleasure moon of Persephone-9, because it’s pretty much the last place he figures that anyone will think he would go. One of Jes’ paragenetic talents is empathy, he susses out the emotional state of everyone around him. That’s not his most dangerous talent, but it’s the one that will give him the most trouble in a place where every being’s desires will be on overt display. Jes is asexual, and being essentially forced to experience other people’s sexual desires upsets his emotional equilibrium to the point of nausea and panic.

But as a half-human, half Rijalan, Jes is a highly unusual and easily recognizable figure among the rigid and xenophobic Rijalans. Among the mixed, mingling and mind-bogglingly attired vacationers and pleasure seekers on Persephone-9, Jes hopes to blend in as one of the glittering crowd. Howsomever, he’s broke and has only the clothes on his back. Jes needs a safe place to hide and a circumspect way to make enough money to support himself and save a little towards the next time he has to flee.

So he joins the circus and hides in plain sight among the performers. Compared to the burly four-armed Hydraxians and the insectoid Mantodeans, Jes isn’t all that exotic. But his talents, not just his empathy but his potentially destructive ability to manipulate gravity fields have the potential to make him stand out in a crowd.

Enough potential to save several of the circus performers from catastrophe during his interview. And enough to make him a useful and potentially lucrative asset for the sadistic criminal boss of the pleasure moon. A man who likes playing with his toys even more than the doctor at the Institute that Jes ran away from.

Jes is the mouse in a deadly cat and mouse game. Niko Dax, that sadistic criminal mastermind, knows Jes’ secret and is holding it over his head in return for Jes’ assistance with more soul destroying crimes at every turn. Jes finds himself getting in deeper in order to protect himself, his friends, and his new home. Until he reaches the point where he can’t continue along the path he’s tightrope walking – and his best friend pays the price of his defiance.

And Jes doesn’t merely get by, he gets downright even with more than a little help from ALL his friends – including the ones he doesn’t actually know he has.

Escape Rating A+: The story of The Circus Infinite is Jes’ journey from beginning to end – and what a journey it is!

The foundation of the story feels like it’s Jes’ coming of age story. He’s an adult – although just barely – when we first meet him. He’s on the run from the Institute and certainly has a grasp on what he doesn’t want. He doesn’t want to be a lab rat anymore. And no matter what he had to do to get out – which we don’t even know at this point – the reader is with him every step of the way in his desire to be free.

We’re able to feel his fear right along with him. That we later experience bits and pieces of Jes’ life in the Institute during the course of the story only adds to the reader’s empathy. It may also remind anyone who remembers Firefly more than a bit of River Tam’s story. The Institute that Jes escaped from and the Academy that Simon Tam rescued his sister from in the opening episode of the series may not be the exact same place, but let’s say that comparisons could certainly be drawn.

In addition to that nod to Firefly, Jes’ integration into and adaptation to the Circus Kozmiqa reads similarly to the way that Lady Everleigh in Jennifer Estep’s Kill the Queen manages to both hide and train herself among a circus-like gladiator troop.

But the heart of The Circus Infinite follows Jes as he becomes an integral part of the Circus Kozmiqa as it becomes his first real home and the circus performers his first real family, found or otherwise. As he gets to know them, and as he explores the world of the pleasure moon and the wider world that he’s never been allowed to be a part of before, we see Jes bloom and grow.

And we’re right there with him as he’s forced to work for the strange, evil, acquisitive sadist Niko Dax. Niko attempts to turn Jes to his own personal Dark Side, while Jes precariously does his best to keep Dax off his back while defending both the circus and himself. Dax is creepy in ways that Jes can see but not completely articulate – but we still feel them and it’s even creepier for not being completely explained.

In the end, in addition to all the fun, all the danger, and all the joy and trepidation of following along with Jes, there’s an extremely satisfying conclusion that still manages to ask some fascinating questions about fate, luck, prophecy and karma. Are the courses of our lives predetermined by fate, or do our choices create our chances?

Jes’ story leaves the reader with more questions than answers, and yet still leaves all the loose ends of Jes’ journey tied up with a beautiful bow of hope and fulfillment.

Speaking of hope, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this world, and certainly hope to see more work from this author!