How High We Go in the Dark pairs Station 11 vibes with a euthanasia theme park for kids

polygon.com:

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel How High We Go in the Dark is the winter’s most ambitious science fiction book: a sequence of interlocked stories that’s drawn comparisons to sagas like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. The story begins in a near-present, where an Arctic expedition accidentally releases a virus that makes people’s bodies mutate and shift form. Each story follows different characters further into the future, as the plague spreads and humanity evolves. These stories involve spaceships and robot dogs, death hotels and a euthanasia amusement park for sick children. And yet these are also down-to-earth stories about how people navigate their jobs and relationships, chase their crushes and worry about their kids, as they head into an unpredictable future.

Polygon recently spoke to the author about the ways How High We Go in the Dark relates to the celebrated recent series Station 11, how he’s dealing with readers’ pandemic fatigue, and what links his characters across time and space. Below this Q&A is an excerpt from the book’s story “City of Laughter.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you set up this excerpt for us? Out of context, it may be a little hard to see the bleak humor in this chapter, the almost absurdist humor behind the very grim idea here.

Sequoia Nagamatsu: In a nutshell, this story centers around a theme park that is euthanizing children who have been afflicted with a fatal plague. The park is called the City of Laughter. Obviously when you’re thinking about the death of children, that name doesn’t seem to connect. I was trying to be honest about how corporations would respond to mass death in this fictional pandemic. They’re