A frustrated artist struggles to compose new work after renting a house that is, she was promised, haunted. A one-character bottle-episode is the reddest of red flags, but The Me You Love in the Dark is a fine start to a darkly meditative story about how, when we’re alone with our thoughts, our thoughts can become a character of their own. Not only is this a book with, for the majority of its pages, a single character talking to herself but it is also almost entirely contained within a single house. Is this story personal or political? It is, in fragments, both but seldom does one focus illuminate the other. We often think of curiosity, learning, and space exploration as an unassailable good but who gets to explore and who gets left behind? What happens to those new lives and new civilizations once they’re sought out? These difficult questions are posed - and not entirely answered - as our cast of characters embark on more personal journeys of self discovery, asking an entirely different set of questions about how best to live an authentic life. But that doesn’t make for an entirely unenjoyable read, particularly when it poses its most intriguing questions involving the unavoidable links between science and colonization. Perhaps Lost on Planet Earth might have benefitted from a bit more time baking in the story-oven as it is, the book sometimes still feels like polemic in lieu of plot. The introduction of this paperback explains that it began as a critique of Star Trek’s politics, but author Magdalene Visaggio found that to be too much of a polemic until she pivoted to focus on one character’s story of self-discovery in a setting that is clearly Trek-inspired without being entirely infringing.
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