Review of Acts of God by Kanan Gill

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., this book is not. I didn’t make this comparison—the book’s promo does, along with comps to Neil Gaiman (booooo, by the way), Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett. Indeed, when you see a book compared to so many heavy hitters, you should probably increase your skepticism rather than you hype. Acts of God is an inchoate mess of a novel, though I rather suspect Kanan Gill might welcome such an excoriating statement, and he or his publicists are welcome to blurb me on his next book. I received an eARC from NetGalley and publisher Blackstone in exchange for a review.

Acts of God follows two parallel, connected stories. In one universe, P. Manjunath is a private investigator on the trail of a globe-spanning mystery. However, it turns out his universe is just a simulation that exists within the universe of Dr. Krishna, who has been simulating Manjunath’s universe illegally. Krishna lives in an absurdist, almost Kafka-esque dystopia built on a principle of absolute transparency, which of course Krishna has violated. Both stories are narrated by a fourth-wall-breaking sentient wall tile.

Look, on the surface, I should love this. I love Vonnegut and Adams and Pratchett. I enjoy absurdist humour and metafictional commentary. The simulation hypothesis can occasionally be done well.

To Gill’s credit, as a work of science fiction, Acts of God is pretty good! There’s some trenchant commentary about AI, the meaning of life, culture, etc., buried deep within this trainwreck of a plot. The simulation hypothesis physics is explained fairly well. The whole society of nuclear winter refugees is interesting.

However, in his attempt to make this book into a weird kind of romp, Gill has done the literary equivalent of throwing a bunch of paint at a canvas and hoping the result is a masterpiece. Sometimes it is! Sometimes—most of the time—it’s just a mess. Pratchett’s secret lay in his deeply compassionate characterization: even the most minor characters, for him, were people who had these full, reified lives, even if we never saw them. Most of Gill’s characters barely have names—and that is fine, not every character has to be fully realized. But, you know, at least give us more backstory for people like P. Manjunath? Or his assistant?

Vonnegut wrote from a place of trauma—“Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time” is a great opening line, and it also signifies Slaughterhouse-Five’s abiding allegory for PTSD. I can see how Gill might be attempting to follow in these footsteps in Acts of God, where Krishna is grieving and processing the death of a colleague who was, in many ways, the closest thing he had to a friend. Yet the reader has very little to ground themselves in here, for the society Gill describes is so foreign it might as well be alien—and there is nothing, nobody around, not even the wall tile, who can really interpret for us the way, say, Arthur Dent can do in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

I want to bring one more author into the chat: Samuel R. Delany. Because he’s also great at writing weird science fiction and fantasy, and his stories are often set in societies far different from our own. Nevertheless, he grounds his characters in the real—it’s just the real for them—in a way that allows readers to grasp the fundamentals. (Except for Dhalgren, of course, because that’s just … pfft. James Joyce wishes.)

Anyway, if I’ve spent most of this review talking about other authors, it’s just because Acts of God didn’t leave enough of an impression for me to critique it very deeply. I don’t want to be harsh. Maybe my sense of humour has just contracted over the past decade. Maybe this is a hilarious book that have many doubled over with laughter! If so, that’s fantastic. But it absolutely did not work for me. Much respect to Gill for swinging big and writing a story that is very much his own, but in this reader’s humble opinion, he has a long way to go.