Advance Praise for Metallic Realms

“A brilliant, funny, and pulpy homage to the golden age of science fiction.” —Esquire, The 20 Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Exciting and tragic and funny and bewildering and just plain wonderful.” —Booklist

“A riveting tale of a sci-fi writing group…This captivates.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A marvelous romp of a book, a tragicomic interweaving of tales, a kaleidoscopic journey that takes place simultaneously in a city apartment and in the vast reaches of space. With his characteristic wit and intellect, Lincoln Michel unearths all sorts of truths about loneliness, community, creativity, and fan culture. I couldn’t put this book down, and it delighted me at every turn.” —Helen Phillips, author of The Need and Hum

“A wild, playful, mind-bending ride, Metallic Realms is an homage in equal parts to Nabokov and to online indie writing communities. A novel ultimately about the sacred communing that takes place when the writer’s imagination meets that of the reader. It is a one-of-a-kind novel that only Lincoln Michel could have written.” —Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged

“A brilliant, inventive satire of writers and super fans, even better for its obvious affection towards both. Lincoln Michel is one of the most surprising speculative writers working today, and this witty planet-hopping love letter to pulp science fiction is the most fun I’ve had reading all year.” —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

“Metallic Realms accomplishes in prose what the classic silent comedians accomplished on film, turning the trips and missteps of a born fumbler into acrobatics: Nothing goes well, but perfectly. Delightful to behold.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations

“A synapse-blasting paean to devotional geekdom and the fugue state of starving artistry, this spectacular postmodern funhouse brims with literary delight on every page. Lincoln Michel is our canniest, most gleeful genre-exploder, and Metallic Realms is a galactic achievement.” —Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat

“A sci-fi masterpiece. The story soars across galaxies but finds its emotional heft in a deft portrait of literary lives in New York and the many dramas of their mingled ambitions and disappointments.” —LitHub

Praise for The Body Scout and Lincoln Michel
An Esquire Pick for the Top 50 Sci-Fi Books of All Time
A New York Times Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novel of 2021

“Stunning.” — Esquire

“Michel's writing is beautiful, too, breathing sophisticated life into stock genre types, and illuminating vast tracks of story with casual wrist-flicks of world building. The Body Scout is a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.” —The New York Times

“The kind of wild, inventive adventure that I’d been searching for...Lincoln Michel is a wildly talented author and this novel is something special indeed.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

“The Body Scout is a fizzy and brilliant confabulation, an anticorporate extrapolative throwdown that is equal parts Pohl-and-Kornbluth and George Saunders, with loads of heart, a skewed and hilarious language all its own, and the audacity to propose that the New York Mets could win a World Series by competent skullduggery. I devoured it.” —Jonathan Lethem, award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn

“Lincoln Michel has the restless brain of Philip K. Dick, the bloodshot eyes of David Cronenberg, the tongue of William Gibson, and a beating heart ripped straight from Raymond Chandler's chest.” —Tony Tulathimutte, Whiting-Award-winning author of Private Citizen