How much I enjoyed this weird fiction novella shouldn't have came as a surprise, as I've read twenty-eight works of short fiction from di Filipo, mostly from a single series, and was pleased with the majority of them. Yet, somehow I haven't read any of his novels, but I will sooner than later now. Much of the weird I've read has been mediocre, but this gives me hope for it again. This alone may have made my novella binge worth it.

The premise of the world is that it's an endless city two blocks wide in both linear directions. These two separated blocks are more distinct than you'd think. They're basically complementary binaries. The world is probably a (spoilered to maximize the sense of wonder when reading)

Spoiler

moebius strip atop a literal ouroboros. Each iteration of the city is slightly different from the next. There's unlikely any beginning or end, as zero would be an arbitrary point as on a number line.

That doesn't make any sense, but why should it have to? It's weird for that reason. The closest thing in the real world to any of this is the proposed linear smart city that would be called, The Line, which would be in Neom, Saudi Arabia, assuming it's ever completed.

This novella has far more ideas crammed in than there reasonably should be, but even only a cursory examination of them was still more than enough for me to overlook all the shortcomings. For example, when people die they're visibly and physically taken to the afterlife by one of two groups. Nothing is ever explicitly explained, so if that's something you need, you won't find it here. The characters are almost as baffled about their world as the readers are. There's a bit of a meta aspect to their pondering, and especially to the writer protagonist's speculative writings.

There isn't a plot. It's simply the characters' daily lives, which is shown in a way that I especially prefer. Only maybe one of the characters develops in any significant way, not that there's all that many pages for many of them to do so. Despite that I liked all the characters. Almost everything is in service of worldbuilding. At first I was annoyed by Di Filippo's thesaurus plundering and the character names, but then I realized that the contrasting vocabularies and absurd names were part of the worldbuilding and it became quaint.

My only complaint is that it isn't longer, because I could read so, so, much more of this. It's absurd how much fun it became the more I read. I was going to rate it lower, but by the end anything that I disliked while reading became irrelevant. There's a sequel which is much lower rated and although it's apparently in the same setting, it's very different. Considering what I spoilered, that makes sense, and even though the probability of disappointment is significant it's still something I'll definitely be reading.