Publisher's Synopsis
A "funny and insightful" (BuzzFeed) novel about a hidden human civilization, a crucial election, and a mysterious invisible force that must not be named, by one of our most imaginative comic novelists When sociologist Nalini Jackson joins the SS Delany for the first manned mission to Jupiter, all she wants is a career opportunity: the chance to conduct the first field study of group dynamics on long-haul cryoships. But what she discovers instead is an entire city encased in a bubble on Jupiter's Europa moon. Even more unexpected, Nalini and the rest of the crew soon find themselves abducted. The city of New Roanoke is riven by wealth inequality and governed by a feckless, predatory elite, its economy run on heedless consumption and income inequality. But in other ways it's different from the cities we already know: it's populated by alien abductees, and it happens to be terrorized by an invisible entity so disturbing that no one even dares acknowledge its existence. Elsewhere, Albuquerque chauffer Chase Eubanks learns of a top-secret rescue mission to save New Roanoke's abductees and jumps at the opportunity, hoping his missing wife is among them. But what begins as a straightforward extraction becomes anything but, as he must learn how to deal with the complex, contradictory, and contrarian impulses of everyday earthlings. This is a madcap, surreal adventure into a Jovian mirror world, one grappling with the same polarized politics, existential crises, and mass denialism that obsess and divide our own. Will New Roanoke survive? Will we?
