We’re following three or maybe four storylines, and some of them are written in clunky typeface to mimic a keyboard and a 1980s computer game. You’ll need patience for HOMEBOUND, which is a dystopian debut.

Or, I guess, you could just follow the actual dystopian chapters, which would make a novella. We start with a quite ordinary Cincinnati setting in 1983, a girl who likes learning to code games. Becks has a grandmother who is sliding into dementia, and she is asked to clear out her grandmother’s house, ready to send the lady to a care home. Among the goods is her late uncle Benjamin’s game consoles and half-completed game. She can’t resist starting to play, then completes the game over time.

A theme of Jewish people runs through the story, so that what seems normal in the early part becomes surreal in the waterworld of 2586, when Captain Yesiko preserves some of the customs and foods of her ancestors, though she’s not sure why. Memories provide identity, and she has no family left but Root, a man older than her, crewing their ship, Babylon. Amid the turmoil of sunken cities and drowned ships, Yesiko agrees to bring passengers north to former Norway. They don’t have family either, just a girl and a boy, and a robot storyteller.  

The oceans are brought to mesh with the computer games by Chaya, the robot, which spins a story of a star wanderer who might be returning to Earth. What nobody knows is whether this is a reality or a hallucination of the AI, or some shred of long-lost programming, like a game. Shula and Tov choose to believe it, but Yesiko can’t afford that luxury.

The nifty cover suggests an actual portal, but really the book is the portal by which we can visit all the time zones, including via emails and memos, internal monologues, first person narration and third person narration. Personally, I only found myself interested in the dystopian scenario of the risen sea. A lot of work went into reconstructing what people may have done or watched in 1980s Cincinnati, but these items don’t seem relevant in relation to the coming disaster. The game commands and options slowed down the action, and they and the emails are hard on the eyes. Different readers will choose their favourite portions of this work by Portia Elan, which reminds me of the SF novel SEA OF TRANQUILITY with its differing time slots. HOMEBOUND is by a Californian who has previously had short fiction published. There are some characters with alternate sexuality, but that’s not the main theme.