Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
A brilliantly imagined literary debut of love, despair, and two people’s search for belonging in a world literally spinning out of control
The acceleration of Earth’s spin begins gradually. At first, days are just a few seconds shorter than normal. Awareness of the mysterious phenomenon hasn’t reached Tanner, a young man preoccupied with dreams of escaping his tiny Alaskan hometown. One night, desperate to make his mark on the world, he runs away. He lands an unlikely job at CWC, the global operator of a network of massive aircraft that orbit the Earth at 30,000 feet, revolutionizing global transportation. Now goods and people can travel anywhere in little more than an hour—you can visit Paris for an evening or order sushi from Japan. But just as Tanner settles into his new life and begins to consider if his feelings for a male colleague might be more than platonic, CWC is shaken by a wave of social unrest and protest.
That unrest sweeps up Winnie. A high school outcast in an era of street protests, wild parties, and online savagery, Winnie falls in with a group of teen activists who blame CWC for the planet’s acceleration. As days on Earth quicken to twenty-three hours, then twenty, the sun rising and setting ever faster, causing violent storms and political meltdowns, Tanner and Winnie’s stories spiral closer together. They meet cynical executives toiling to forestall the crises they created and religious zealots for whom the apocalypse can’t come soon enough, lobbyists and lovers all coping in their own ways, and Victor Bickle—the self-aggrandizing TV scientist whose shameful secret will bind Tanner and Winnie’s fates . . . if they can uncover it before the Earth spins so fast that even gravity might lose its grip.
Three-hour days. Two-hour days . . .
A propulsive exploration of capitalism, technology, and our place within a system that dwarfs us, Circular Motion is one of the most ingenious debut novels of our time.
“A debut both wildly imaginative and deeply emotional… With shades of emotional planetary disaster novels like Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles and politically charged climate fiction like Stephen Markley’s The Deluge, Circular Motion comes from a writer capable of two things often misconstrued as counter to each other: deep, rich characters and elaborate, challenging ideas.”—Jonathan Russell Clark, Washington Post
“Wonderful – maybe my top read of the year so far: disturbing, clever, beautifully written and, like all the best dystopias, it makes me even more grateful for the world I live in now . . . stunningly impressive.”—Alison Flood, The New Scientist
“Most end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it novels draw on a short list of culprits: environmental crisis, asteroid strike, pandemic, nuclear war. So it’s to Alex Foster’s credit that in Circular Motion he’s come up with something new . . . It’s a fable for our times, with a moral about corporate responsibility and the need for concerted political action to address what are clear and present, not to mention hastening, threats . . . [Foster] shows impressive skill at world building and unbuilding in this well-paced adventure.”—Alex Good, Toronto Star
“Foster keeps the novel balanced on a knife’s edge between satire and realism, imagining compromises with day contraction that are both ridiculous and extremely plausible… If Foster doesn’t fully give in to the satirical impulse, however, it is because he is too interested in his characters. In those people who, like us, are…affected by, and in some small ways, responsible for, the world’s dissolution.”—Locus
“An intense character study, Circular Motion‘s moody prose is entrenched in bottomless loneliness and emotional disrepair. …In the pessimistic but thoughtful future-set novel Circular Motion, existential anxieties intermesh and explode as the sun rises and sets with increased frequency.”—Foreword
“An impressive debut. Foster is a writer of imaginative daring and narrative dexterity.”—Jeffrey Eugenides
“Circular Motion is a gift: every paragraph offers something to make you think, laugh, feel, or simply look up from the page and sigh in awe or recognition.”—Jonathan Safran Foer
“I’m a sucker for doomsday novels, but Circular Motion sucker-punched me right in the heart. Brilliantly written and utterly absorbing. Who needs gravity when Alex Foster keeps you absolutely grounded in his prose.”—Gary Shteyngart
“Circular Motion is a deep investigation of how time is valued in contemporary society, while also being a deftly plotted page-turner. I read it in just a couple of sittings; time flew.”—Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Written by Gwyneth Henke for Circular Motion.
1. Circular Motion is a novel about the extremes of globalization and urbanization, but its three main characters—Winnie, Tanner, and Professor Bickle—all come from a rural small town in Alaska. How do each of the three characters relate to their hometown throughout the novel? Do their feelings towards Keber Creek change over time? If so, why? More broadly, consider how Alaska—as frontier and, simultaneously, remote outpost—functions within the book.
2. The day-to-day lives of the characters in Circular Motion are increasingly fragmented by the online content available to them, first through phones and then, as the novel progresses, through the Shell. The book structure mimics this with interjections of documents, brief insights into other characters’ thoughts, and transcripts of podcasts and television shows. What effect did these “clips” have on your reading experience? What do you think Foster is trying to say by employing this narrative device?
3. Although Winnie isn’t aware of Tanner until she meets him in Keber Creek, Tanner maintains a first-person retrospective awareness of Winnie throughout the narrative (for example, “She didn’t know me yet, and I didn’t know her. We didn’t know we were bound together on a world spinning out of control” [33]). What is the effect of Winnie’s ignorance and Tanner’s apparent omniscience? How does their increasing proximity invoke the title’s concept of “circular motion”?
4. Consider the role of social media, global commerce, transportation, and corporations in Foster’s imagined future. What similarities do you see between Foster’s portrayal of society and our own? Do you think the world he imagines is likely? Why or why not?
5. In CWC’s Equity Push, Foster shows corporations manufacturing social outrage to deter acute environmental concerns. How did seeing this process from the perspective of both the corporation (through Grant, Bickle, Tanner, and Miguel) and the public (through Nat, Luna, and Winnie) make you feel? Do you think this is an exaggeration or a reflection of current events? How do corporations influence public opinion today?
6. Miguel becomes consumed by his job as an assistant to Cromwell Grant. The more he works, the more he chastises Tanner for not working as hard as him. When Tanner argues for a better work-life balance, Miguel accuses him of not having enough ambition or self-control. Do you ever struggle with your own relationship to work? Do you see yourself more in Miguel or Tanner? Which do you think is the healthier outlook?
7. Nat tells Winnie and Luna that the brass bird statue in her family’s courtyard means “Go back for what you’ve forgotten” (146). How do you see this theme recurring throughout the novel? What has been forgotten—and how might one go back for it? Where do you see characters attempting to do so?
8. As Nat and Luna’s friendship frays, Winnie realizes that “the pain she would feel if her friend group fell apart was heartbreak” (126). In the end, the group does fall apart—not from arguments, as Winnie feared, but from Nat’s shocking death. How does Nat’s death impact Winnie, her friendship with Luna, and both characters’ trajectories into the future?
9. When Miguel breaks down in his deposition about CWC’s data leak, he says, “I had come to feel guilty for what I had done at CWC and if this was the universe’s way of punishing me, I didn’t care to fight it” (330). How does guilt function throughout the novel? When does it occur or fail to occur? How do characters seek out, or avoid, punishment for their guilt?
10. As days shorten, companies start prescribing regimented workdays, overriding people’s increasingly irrelevant circadian cycles. The Industrial Revolution enacted a similar, though less extreme, transformation throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as global workers moved from agrarian lifestyles to time clocks, twelve-hour shifts, and factory labor. How does work change our relationship to time? What effect does that have on human health? How do you see that happening in your own life?
11. After her electrocution, Winnie pushes herself to explore the world more. Coming home one night, she feels “accomplished just to be alive, which (she realized that night) if you’re really truly alive, is enough” (77). What does it mean to be “really truly alive”? When do you see characters achieving that? Or, why do they fail?
12. Late in the book, Winnie describes the world as “cognitively uninhabitable” (267). Reread that paragraph. What does she mean by this? Do you ever feel that way about our world? Why or why not?
13. After the Beijing gala, Winnie becomes obsessed with finding out why she exists. She attempts to track down both her parents, and then her hometown, to answer this question. What answer do you think Winnie gets, if any? How do other characters in the novel answer, or fail to answer, the same question?
14. The chapters of Circular Motion are titled according to the diminishing length of days. The final chapter, “End of Days,” references this pattern, but it also invokes the eschatological fixation propounded by Tanner’s father and other religious groups. How do you think we’re supposed to read “End of Days” in this context? What did you make of the religious groups and perspectives shown throughout the book?
15. Once it became clear that the westward circuit was causing day contraction, why didn’t people stop using it? Do you think that’s realistic to how people would behave in a similar crisis? What parallels do you see to public and political inaction in our times?
16. Bickle is continuously represented as deeply insecure. That insecurity leads to increasingly erratic attempts to cement his status through raises and public interviews until he’s eventually fired for those efforts. What role does insecurity play in the novel? What is the relationship between social media and insecurity?
17. Midway through the book, Tanner recalls a childhood game in which his teacher made students choose sides of an argument to debate. He remarks that “it seemed a good way to raise little monsters” (164). So much of Circular Motion is about the constant demands modernity makes on us to have an opinion on everything from equity to corporate misconduct to environmental catastrophe. Luna and Nat illustrate this particularly well in their fiery Future’s Advocates club. Do you think people should have an opinion on all major events, or, like Tanner, do you ever feel hesitant or paralyzed to make such judgments? What should the individual’s relationship to outrage be?
18. Foster ends the novel on a climax: gravity lost, the Shell doomed, Winnie’s survival only vaguely assured (“the paramedics saying that with full gravity and flat ground, the girl might well have died” [356]). How did you feel about this decision? What do you think comes next for these characters, and for the world at large?
19. The novel ends with a poignant reflection from Winnie as, deeply wounded, she deliriously imagines herself floating through a crumbling Shell into space. Foster writes, “What had it been like to live at that critical time when all the world was more malleable than the human heart, she couldn’t say” (358). Discuss this line. What did you take it to mean?
Suggestions for Further Reading:
A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Bewilderment by Richard Powers
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
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