The Monthly Read: Out of this world art – A review of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

by Mary Drake –

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green, 352pp, Dutton, NY (2018)

Some books just take you by storm. You know, the kind you stay up reading late into the night. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is that type of novel. But it is more than just fascinating; it is also humorous, topical, and quirky. 

It’s a novel about aliens from outer space who come to Earth. Now you might be saying, Oh, come on! That topic has been done to death. True, in 1938 radio broadcaster Orson Welles warned listeners about the “strange beings” that had just landed on Earth and were supposedly “the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.” But in An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, author Hank Green has a new take on aliens. They look like “a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor. . . .” But a Transformer that is “full of energy and power” and “looked like it might, at any moment, turn and fix that empty, regal stare on me.” The “me” being the protagonist who finds this unique sculpture on a Manhattan sidewalk at 2:45 in the morning. She’s a vivacious, energetic, smart graphic designer named April May who is just going home from a boring job that stifles her creativity. She comments that the sculpture is “stunningly done” but almost passes it by, before going back to make a YouTube video about her find.

The next morning she wakes to find that her one-minute video has gone viral and she’s become instantly famous as the person who had “First Contact” with “Carl,” as she has offhandedly named him. It’s not just that the sculpture is made of a material that doesn’t exist on Earth, but also that 64 of them, looking exactly the same, have appeared simultaneously in every major city on Earth. The only possible explanation is that they have come from outer space.

Now, again, before you start rolling your eyes, the author Hank Green has described all this very convincingly. The woman who determines that the sculptures are made of an unearthly element is a materials scientist from UC Berkeley. She tells April May that Carl’s “thermal properties make no sense.  He’s showing zero-percent thermal conductivity. . . . He’s like an aerogel but more dense than uranium.”

Soon April May has become such a celebrity that she’s on every television channel and she turns into an instant Twitter sensation accruing millions of followers. Overnight she becomes wealthy and quits her day job. She gets an agent as well as a personal assistant to schedule her appearances and manage her publicity. This is not to say that her life necessarily improves. For a while it seems that way, but all the travel and interviews soon cut into her personal life, and she becomes estranged from her partner. To herself she admits that she has become a fame junkie: “I liked getting stopped for photos in the airport, I liked getting paid, I liked the attention, and I was worried about it ending. . . . That one day, the most interesting and important thing about me would be a thing I did a long time ago.” 

Then, as the saying goes, the s*** hit the fan. In book speak, this is called the inciting incident, the moment when the struggle that is at the center of the novel begins. One day, April May is on a news show participating in a panel discussion between herself and someone named Peter Petrawicki, the author of the Amazon number-one-ranked book called Invaded. Maybe you can see where this is going; April May is completely blindsided when Petrawicki says that the Carls must be considered “a far more powerful force. . . . that has not just invaded our cities but now our minds.” He’s referring to the fact that members of the general population have begun having similar, recurring dreams in which everyone plays games and solves riddles. Petrawicki thinks the aliens are invading our minds and says that Earthlings might be up against an unknown and perhaps more powerful civilization, but “This is America. We have never been scared away from a fight.”

After this confrontation, the pro-Carl side, which assumes the sculptures are benign and perhaps even helpful, is spearheaded by April May. Conversely, an organization called the Defenders, who assume that the Carls harbor hostile intentions, is led by Peter Petrawicki, and the two factions begin to clash more and more. A deep divide occurs within the country that one can’t help but feel it is reminiscent of what’s happening now. At one point, April May muses that Petrawicki’s ideology “made perfect sense . . . to people who were more afraid of otherness.” Isn’t that what it always comes down to—us versus them? The world seems naturally dichotomous: male/female, rich/poor, conservative/liberal (or is it progressive?), Republican/Democrat. It seems to be in the nature of things. 

But what is this “absolutely remarkable thing” that the title refers to? Is it just the appearance of the Carls, which is certainly a remarkable in and of itself? Or is it what happens as a result of the Carls? Yes, there is certainly divisiveness with harsh rhetoric on both sides, and in the end some unfortunate violence occurs. But also, the Carls have enabled people to solve problems by working things out together. During the dreams everyone is having, more than 500 puzzles have been completed; we’re told that the dreams are a “shared experience” in which the dreamers work to solve difficult puzzles that ultimately reveal something about human civilization. “All the more complicated clues require collaboration,” and among those interested in solving the puzzles a Dreamer community forms that is comprised of people from “all over the world with different ideas and worldviews, all working together toward a common goal.” As one character says, “it’s a pretty beautiful thing.” And pretty remarkable.

Author Hank Green’s first novel is a quirky, insightful, and compulsively readable fantasy. He’s obviously good at imagining things, especially on-line programs like the ones he has created called Crash Course and SciShow which benefit teachers, students and children. You might say that creativity runs in the family, since his brother John Green is also the author of fantasies, his 2012 The Fault in Our Stars being a NYT’s bestseller. Both brothers are very active on YouTube, which, by the way, is what started the whole Carl adventure. I guess you never know what you might find in the next video.