EYES OF IRIS

In Harris’ SF novel, a doctor’s psychological evaluation of an unusual patient could doom the planet.

Ernest Kairos is asked by one of his hospital’s emergency-room physicians to engage with a newer patient to see if they warrant continuing an involuntary psych hold. Irisa Solovyov, who prefers to be called “Iris,” is a 20-year-old college student studying computational neuroscience; she came in recovering from a drug-induced hallucination that appears to involve delusional thinking, which is Kairos’ field of expertise. Kairos promises to call off the hold if she tells him the full story of her vision—and it’s unlike anything he’d ever heard from other patients. He listens to Iris’ tales and secretly records them; first, he hears about her apparent visions of past lives, in which she was a young Italian woman in the 1960s or an Egyptian boy playing an ancient board game, among others. She found a shaman to help her guide her mental travels, but after drinking a hallucinogenic drink, she found herself inhabiting in the body of a strange, “human-esque” but clearly inhuman creature in the future; unlike her previous visions, this time she was stuck, and couldn’t return to her own time or body. After a few days as a weird, gray worker among many others, the creature Iris inhabits was taken by its gods to another place she could never have predicted—and where she encounters a very strange companion, indeed. Harris’ offbeat work of speculative fiction is told mainly through transcripts of Kairos’ audio files. Its vision of the future is an unusual one that’s both plausible and horrifying, and readers will certainly find it unforgettable. The work features some stunning worldbuilding along the way, and readers will feel as misplaced, and as entranced, as Iris does in her vision. None of the major players in the narrative are particularly likable, as their flaws are always on clear display; however, this has the effect of making them feel all the more genuine—and, ultimately, all the more human.

An often thrilling tale of an unpredictable future.