Tomorrow Never Knows by Eddie Robson

Last month, I read Eddie Robson's most recent novel, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words; this month, I jumped back to read his debut, Tomorrow Never Knows, from small UK press Snowbooks.

Tomorrow Never Knows by Eddie Robson

Published: 2015
Acquired: July 2024
Read: September 2024

Though I enjoyed Strange New Words a lot, this is in some ways exactly what I wanted out of an original Eddie Robson novel, based on my familiarity with his Doctor Who work. I think Robson thrives when he juxtaposes the everyday with the fantastic, and that's exactly what we have here: it's about a small group of ordinary people living their lives... but on a platform floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter. It's one of those books where there's not one overarching plot, but rather lives of the protagonists weave in and out of each other, intersecting and connecting and having unexpected ramificiations. Robson has good worldbuilding,* good jokes, but above all a good sense of heart; I really liked all of these people and their struggles and wanted to see them succeed. They felt like real people living in the future, living mundane ordinary lives... but in each case, an ordinary life tinged for the better by an encounter with the fantastic.

The ending is, honestly, kind of sudden, but as I sat on it for a couple days, I came to be okay with that. It's not a book about unravelling cosmic mysteries—there are some here, but that's just not what the book is about. What matter is how our encounters with the cosmic change and reshape us. It reminds me of what George Levine says in his excellent Dying to Know: that the requirement for growth and self-knowledge is first self-humiliation, that we must first deny the self in order to expand it. If we understood more what happened at the end, I don't think that would be the case, and the novel wouldn't totally work. Here, all the protagonists see enough of the universe to realize that there is more they need to know of the universe, and thus they all end the novel in a better place than they began it.

* For example, I thought the stuff about the class implications of homosexuality in a world where the rich can afford to genetically tweak their offspring was a very clever, interesting idea.