Elly Bangs was raised in a New Age cult and once rode her bicycle alone from Washington State to the Panama Canal. She lives in Seattle, where she spends her days fixing machines and her nights writing short stories, novellas, and novels—usually speculative fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and uncategorized weirdness—with a thematic emphasis on longing, heartbreak, and the grim fate of humankind. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, and others, and she's a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2017). Learn more about her at elbangs.com, where you can use her "Story Premise Bot," and discover A Pocket Guide to Nuclear War Survival & Preparedness.

Unity by Elly Bangs

In a desperate escape, Danae and her lover Naoto hire the enigmatic ex-mercenary Alexei to guide them out of the imploding city. But for Danae to reunify, the three new fugitives will have to flee across the otherworldly beauty of the postapocalyptic Southwest.

Evoking the gritty cyberpunk of Mad Max and the fluid idealism of Sense8, Unity is a spectacular new re-envisioning of identity. Breakout author Elly Bangs has created an expressive, philosophical, science-fiction thriller that expands upon consciousness itself.

 

REVIEWS

  • "Unity is an astonishing debut, twisty and startling . . . an absorbing, thrilling ride."

    – New York Times

  • "Unity manages to be simultaneously exciting and philosophical, a brilliant gut-punch of a novel."

    – Kij Jonhson, author of At the Mouth of the River of Bees

  • "Echoes of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon or the Netflix series Sens8, but this is an entirely original and ambitious creation."

    – New York Journal of Books
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

PART I: UNDERWORLD

I

This is the first thing I remember when I begin to cohere in unity: a woman standing at a railing, peering down into the vats at the final bottom of Bloom City—and a man in a cramped air transport lavatory, watching his reflection in the scuffed plastic mirror point a wave pistol at its own head.

Across ten thousand kilometers of distance I remember both these scenes, simultaneous with each other: how the beat of the compressors throbbed in her bones; how the power cell hummed and exhaled ozone when he primed the weapon to fire; how every nerve in her last remaining body drew taut as she braced herself to fall; how his reflection gazed back so stoically as to seem already dead, but his pulse was only quickening as he lay his finger on the trigger.

Just as he braced to fire, the woman swung her legs over the railing and leaned forward so that it was only one hand, then one finger, holding her back from the drop. She knew the machinery would leave no trace: in minutes, her body would be minced and spread thin across the ocean floor, unified with the trash and tailings. Meanwhile, the man imagined that whoever found his corpse would never grasp the irony: that after every narrowly dodged killing shot of every battle of every war, it would be his own weapon that finally did him in.

These two people were equally convinced of their own insignificance. Each could name only one person who might miss them. Neither knew then what I'm startled to realize now: that if he had pushed, or if she had let go, nothing would be left of the world today but a uniform ocean of lifeless quicksilver, the ghosts of billions dead, and the single lonely intellect of my lost sibling. Nothing else would have survived the last war.

I used to believe I could never have any one beginning, but in the eerie symmetry of that moment, I know I've found it. This is where all the threads of my memory start—because the story of these two people is my story too. Because the events of the past five days will forever define the person I'm becoming.

Because whatever else it is, and however hopeless it may seem to me as it all weaves itself, scene by scene, into the fabric of my being—

This is the story of how I survived.

How we'll all survive.