Hawai‘i's Future is Underwater
In Midnight, Water City writer Chris McKinney takes the plunge into sci-fi noir with elan and audacity. The novel of a future Hawai‘i lands like a cannonball in the summer reading pool.
“Forty years ago, in the year 2102, the asteroid Sesshō-seki hurled toward Earth at nineteen miles per second…”
So dawns another day in the year 2142. The world is at peace. So peaceful it’s kind of boring, actually. Ever since the divine intervention of a massive telescope on a certain volcano helped to locate and blast Sesshō-seki, much of the spice has gone out of life. On the other hand, global unity in the common cause of survival has led to a lot of nifty technocratic solutions.
Take housing, a major issue in Hawai‘i today that is only getting worse. As McKinney’s unnamed narrator says, “Most of us, The Less Thans, don’t live on the island or on the low floors of the new seascrapers and the high floors of old skyscrapers. We live in the float ‘burbs, clusters of domed townhouses that bob on the ocean surface… magnetically moored far enough from the shore that they aren’t an eyesore.”
“This distinctive novel brims with delightful innovations, razor-sharp social commentary and richly wrought characters, all set against a teeming underwater city.”
For these Less Thans, employment can be found recycling (“plastic skimming”) or as middle management of resorts and theme parks. “We live on means just enough to enable us to do nothing after we put in our forty hours.” If they save their pennies they can afford a once-a-month visit to a life-extension clinic for a little hibernation. The actual theme park employees are “neo-hippies required to live in primitive huts and tree houses designed to not ruin the natural aesthetic of the island.” Hale‘iwa meets Lost, in other words.
The mountain base of the telescope is a world-wide destination for the reverent masses, where the millions flock “on their pilgrimage to pay reverence … to Akira’s Telescope,” a mash-up of Lourdes and TMT.
Well, not TMT but its next-gen super-successor. Unnamed, like McKinney’s detective narrator, but nicknamed Savior’s Eye, it has made the island “the most important place in the world,” albeit one without Native Hawaiians, or anyone except of course The Money and those neo-hippie gardeners.
By now in this pared-down recitation of the mischief afoot in McKinney’s brave new world it should be clear that any similarities to the present one are sheerest coincidence. But it’s still lucky we live…float ‘burb.
“It’s not great, but it’s better than living on the continent… The quad state Great Leachate, the biggest landfill in the history of man. Penicillin rivers running like veins from Missouri to the Nashville Dam.”
You have been forewarned.
In Midnight, Water City (Soho Press, 2021), McKinney, Hawai‘i’s most prolific and obsessed social-realist novelist—a fiery diagnostician of contemporary Island ills—takes the plunge into sci-fi noir with the psychedelic aplomb of a master illusionist.
But while this seems a clear case of local boy makes good by ditching his hometown wardrobe, don’t assume for a second that the McKinney of Boi No Good, The Tattoo, and Yakadoshi: Age of Calamity has left us behind for a Star Wars fantasy of capes and light-sabers.
Though his opening line cues us to a familiar sci-fi world-ending scenario—remember the year both Deep Impact and Armageddon opened weeks apart?—author McKinney lays his cards on the table. Setting the cliché catastrophe 40 years in the past changes the game from what-if? to what-now? Earth has been saved. Now what? What’s left to care about?
Nothing, thinks McKinney’s antsy, bored, unnamed anti-hero, who’s on an elevator going down to the bottom of the sea off the coast of what sounds like Kona. “177 atmospheres below sea level in Volcano Vista, the world’s largest seascraper, is where I’m headed. That used to be crush depth of a super sub, but we beat crush depth like we beat global warming.”
It’s almost painful to stop quoting here. These blasé revelations McKinney peels off throughout the book are like candy. He’s writing like a gambler at the end of an all-night winning spree, thumbing Benjamins from his literary bankroll as tips to dealers, cocktail waitresses, the Lady Luck sitting next to him, even the sad sack who’s just busted flush at the next-door table.
Still, you have to think, at the outset, that he’s world-building himself into a corner. Where does a story go that starts with a happy ending? Because in the high drama that followed the successful strike on Sesshō-seki—“killing stone” in Japanese myth, said to kill anyone who touches it—something wonderful happened. Humanity came together, unified around a single faith, for once. Science, in the form of the smartest woman in the world, Akira Kimura.
And then we all lived happily ever after.
Heck, four out of five girls’ names are Ascalon, after the cosmic ray devised by Kimura, “scientist, savior, hero of the goddamn human race.”
But salvation came at a price. In the tumultuous days during the creation of the cosmic ray and its deployment, Kimura reached out and hired our narrator; the world government deputized him with unlimited freedom of action. His job? To neutralize every known threat to Kimura, suddenly a lightning rod for every crackpot and anti-science conspiracy theorist. (If this sounds Fauci-familiar, it’s worth noting that McKinney finished the book in 2016.) The problem is that Kimura and her planet-saving revelations were doubted by a couple of serious scientists who had the ears of important politicians.
There’s really no question. After all, beating global warming is a worthy, existential goal, just as important to stopping an asteroid or a pandemic. The ends and the means surely align. Right?
“…post-apocalyptic noir even darker and more stylized than Blade Runner.”
So our narrator got busy with his rail gun.
And now he has doubts. Do we-the-reader share them? The longer the story goes the more disturbing its negative capability. And it’s a specific one for Hawai‘i readers that is probably going to be lost on thoses without our regional and cultural sensitivities. It could very well be that we who live here are may be the only ones who will get it, “it” being the full distortion, the glimpse behind the curtain, the hint of horror, in a state of placid happiness that requires as a precondition that a distinct regional subset of people no longer exist.
Some of us been erased.
Who’s left? Rich people, of course. The Money, as the novel calls them, flocked to Mauna Kea—which no longer goes by that name, of course—to watch Kimura light the skies ablaze from its summit, leaving a permanent scar to remind humanity of its savior and our eternal debt. They stayed on, finding the Islands convenient. Soon the locals were living somewhere else.
Nobody can say precisely where they/we went. But in McKinney’s vision of 2142, they/we are rumored to exist in burrows in that Great Leachate landfill that fills the Middle West of America.
It resonates. On this anniversary of the July 15, 2019 kupuna blockade on Mauna Kea, a week after the news broke that most of Kaua‘i’s market-listed housing has been bought up by offshore millionaires and billionaires during the pandemic—it resonates. Like the aftermath of bad nightmare, or the revision in plain sight of who gets to vote in a democracy.
Anyway, our detective is working on a guilty conscience and a marriage on the rocks when he receives a message from Kimura to come visit her far beneath the sea. It’s been a few years. What he finds will send him on a journey of investigation into this happy ending of all happy endings which leads him to…
Well, we know better than to give that away, don’t we?
Especially when half the pleasure in the book is listening to the narrator as he mutters to himself and cracks wise to those who get in his way. You know the type: cynical, grumpy, aging, beat-up, relatively poor and possessed of the familiar charismatic fatalism of the breed. A man you’d expect to find at the bar swapping lies and trading boilermakers with Dashiel Hammet, Raymond Chandler, Scott Kikkawa…
The other half of the pleasure in Midnight, Water City is its prophetic quality, of course. And it has been proven that McKinney has the pulse of this place. Sci-fi may be a departure, but his detective is only a half-step from the twice-burned hard case, just paroled from prison, who stumbled and slashed through the noir crime novella Yakadoshi: Age of Calamity (Mutual Publishing, 2016). Yakadoshi, set in the hostess bars of Kapi‘olani Boulevard and steeped in cocaine and police corruption, wasn’t read by nearly enough people in the places that mattered, given that its verisimilitude reeked of the real-life scandal that was blowing apart the Honolulu Police Department.
(Want to guess who came to Yakadoshi’s publication party at Home? Hint: they’re both in prison at the moment.)
But where Yakadoshi reels toward an ever-madder neon frenzy, Midnight, Water City proceeds in the cool tones appropriate to an aquarium and a society whose condos are underwater. The chill tone also befits the science-based commentary of our Virgil-hero who is about to defenestrate Utopia and its mythology. And it suits a detective who is pushing 80—finally eligible for Social Security, but whose many-times-replaced body parts are barely in working order.
In a recent radio interview by Noe Tanigawa of Hawai‘i Public Radio, McKinney made the sly claim that he’d turned to science fiction out of desperation at being “a middle-class guy living in the suburbs, with a wife and two kids.” He professed bewilderment at teaching writing at Honolulu Community College to students who didn’t read and only wrote science fiction. Can’t teach em? Might as well join em.
But McKinney was underplaying his hand, of course. He’s been pushing Hawai‘i’s often overly prim and buttoned-up fiction scene ever since The Tattoo, his first novel, a claustrophobic prison tale of a mute, white tattoo artist listening to the life story of a local murderer while doing his back. It was a success for Mutual Publishing and has sold ever since, eventually being picked up by Soho Press, the New York City indie that’s bringing out Midnight, Water City. (Soho also licensed McKinney’s second “Korean” novel, Queen of Tears, from Mutual Publishing, whose Bennett Hymer has been in McKinney’s corner from the start.)
“McKinney pushes everything you think you know about noir crime fiction several decades into the future and drowns it in the Pacific Ocean. The end result is every writer’s dream—a truly audacious idea fully and flawlessly developed.”
It’s more like Midnight, Water City is the logical extension of a penchant for the apocalyptic. 2005’s Bolohead Row is a roaring lowlife Tortilla Flats about crackheads and ice dealers and a dive bar run by the narrator’s alcoholic mother; it all comes to a demented head in a shootout at a cockfight. In McKinney’s “suburban” novel, 2009’s Mililani Mauka—the date a perfect complement, as Americans lost 40% of their wealth (and Americans of color much more)—the line between middle class and homeless is vanishing. A prologue follows John Krill, a dispossessed Native Hawaiian member of Wai‘anae’s “16 miles of homeless” coastline, as he takes a bulldozer to the local mall before committing suicide by cop. In Boi No Good the action crests as a Category 5 hurricane hits Waikīkī and a manifestation of Kanaloa, the squid-magician god of the Underworld, tears apart all the hotels and condominiums that represent the ruination of Hawai‘i.
In each of these eruptions, no matter how extreme or “pushed,” McKinney manages a tone of absurd dark comedy and crushing human pathos—and then takes it to another level. Some elements may soar, others may drag, but he’s not interested in the safe, tidy novel beloved of New York literary publishing, that’s for sure. Instead, there’s a sense of the artist refusing to back down. The novel always presents a test to the writer, a measuring stick of their overall failure or success, that he or she knows in their guts, usually to the inch. McKinney’s books, you get the feeling, always leave him unsatisfied, almost panting to get back in action with the next one. In this he is unique in Hawai‘i writing; only Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s streak from 1993 to 2006 approaches his feverish 21-year run.
And Midnight, Water City is where it all comes together. He’s funnier, smarter, calmer. One quotable line after another—our eyes dance ahead to the next. One clever prefiguration of the future after another—the kind that make you smile with recognition even as you shiver at its callous inevitability. One plot twist after another—and yet we don’t quite anticipate the latest. Or the last.
Just as Moana through bleached beach glass can be seen as the spawn of Kevin Costner and Waterworld—if looked at with the correct prescriptive lenses, they’re the same movie, one “correct” and the other, well, a trifle over-coked, thanks to Dennis Hopper—Midnight, Water City takes the arc of McKinney’s writing career, all those pounding, righteously in-your-face, comic-realist novels and magically transforms The Big Story, which is Hawai‘i’s Story in our time, a story of colonization-ruination-modernization-digitization, into a gorgeous and miraculous vision of today’s tomorrow. Only McKinney is doing it without all the apparatus of the usual Disney/Pixar/Broadway blockbuster; no lasers, no smoke, no holograms. No 3D goggles. He’s making it happen on a white page.
There are moment, reading the book, when all the dots connect in a brief flash—a Pow!Wow! of prose—and we get a crisp instant neurological/spiritual insight like something Alan Watt or Aldous Huxley might describe. Other times we’re into deep politics, hearing the voice of Haunani-Kay Trask chanting in our ears. This is more than a Sensurround Cyclorama in the style of Yayoi Kusuma, although there is an immersive Sponge Bob Square Pants In Immersive 3D playing in someone’s living room in the book.
Entertaining, visual, suspenseful, with a monster at the center just waiting to flex its muscles, Midnight, Water City fulfills a complete arc of story but is part one of a trilogy. We may need a year to recover and get ready for the next installment, but we’re already looking forward.
For a 2016 interview with Chris McKinney about his then just-released Yakadoshi: Age of Calamity, click here.
Image by Peerapon Chantharainthron.
Don Wallace is the editor of The Hawai‘i Review of Books. He has written for Harper’s, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Surfer’s Journal, HONOLULU Magazine, Fast Company, and other publications. His last book was The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village that Restored Them All (Sourcebooks, 2014).
Wallace wrote the documentary film Those Who Came Before: The Musical Journey of Eddie Kamae and was awarded the 2020 Lorretta J. Petrie Award for outstanding service to Hawai‘i’s literature and the 2019 award from the Society of Professional Journalists Hawai‘i chapter for best Body of Work by a writer. A McDowell Colony Fellow, he won the Pluma de Plata Mexicana for reporting on Mexico, a Copernicus Society award for a novel in progress, and the Next Stop Hollywood short story contest. In 2018, he organized a poll of 70 Hawai‘i writers, editor, booksellers, scholars, and others to vote on Hawai‘i’s 50 Essential Books, which he then wrote up for HONOLULU Magazine. He followed up with a Roll of Honor of the next 37 books.
