Flux by Jinwoo Chong
(Melville House Publishing, 2023)
Reviewed by Jamie Mollart
Flux by Jinwoo Chung is told over three storylines in three timelines which wind together and intertwine in a way designed to confuse and entrance the reader.
Bo is an 8-year-old reeling over his mother’s death, while obsessing over a Noir Cop drama, Raider, and arguing with his father and brother.
Blue is a 48-year-old mute, able to talk through cybernetic implants, who is called upon to take part in a television expose of the tech startup he used to work for, Flux.
Then finally Brandon is offered a job at the same firm and soon realises that things are not what they seem within the company. Brandon is employed by Flux because of a quirk of his genetic makeup which enables them to harness a chemical reaction in his brain to generate electricity and create a perpetual energy battery.
The problem is the company is all smoke and mirrors and its enigmatic front woman, Io Hemsworth is hiding something dangerous. As Brandon gets deeper into Flux and discovers they have inadvertently discovered time travel, his grip on reality, or maybe even reality itself, starts to unravel.
Through Blue we learn something terrible happened at Flux that killed some employees, disgraced IO and publicly brought the company down.
As I read that back it sounds really cool and this book should be, but somehow it just isn’t.
All three of the characters suffer from guilt caused by some sort of loss and are struggling to connect with their families and everyday life. Essentially at its core this book is a meditation on grief and what you would sacrifice to undo the traumatic experience, but it’s packaged as a time travel puzzle. Where it’s strong is in a discussion of identity, particularly Asian identity in America, and in this dissection of grief. The description of Flux as an organisation is powerfully prophetic; the company is a small leap from something like Tesla and Io is an exciting focal point, both of them scary and attractive in equal measures.
The prose is powerful and often surprising, Jinwoo Chong is clearly a talented writer. Unfortunately, on the evidence of this novel at least, he’s not as good at structure and plot.
The interconnectedness of the three stories is obvious from early on. I would even suggest you could work it out from my description of the plots above, which contain no spoilers at all, and this totally undermines the tension of the novel. It was clear very early in the novel how the stories connected with each other, and it made the reading experience a slog to find out if I was wrong. I wasn’t.
The time travel itself is problematic too, it’s never made clear how or why it works and to what purpose, I’m not sure if it’s purposefully oblique or not fully realised, but the impression it leaves is one of narrative laziness. It’s as if Chong needed a plot device to frame his discussions, settled on time travel, but never got round to thinking it through properly.
Fundamentally the problems lie in the fact that the book is too long, the plot gains traction in the middle third, but the third either side could be half their current length, the plot would lose nothing and the whole thing would have been much tauter and less frustratingly ambiguous. The whole Raider sub plot seems to be there to allow one scene to happen and it could have worked without it.
The quote on the top of the front page describes it as mind bending and with a bit more work on the structure maybe it would have been, but in the end it’s all just a bit messy. Sadly, what could be an exciting sci-fi novel ends up squandering a core good idea on a flabby plot and a chaotic structure.
Review from BSFA Review 21 - Download your copy here.