Now and then, a novel comes along that profoundly vindicates my expensive habit of random bookstore impulse purchases. Alex Foster’s Circular Motion (2025) lured with with its cool cover and a gonzo science fiction premise, but ultimately won me over completely with its insightful, sideways strategy of commenting on the world through a speculative lens.
Circular Motion takes place in a future dominated by “the circuit,” a constantly circulating network of high-altitude aircraft that have dramatically shortened transit times, making world travel all the more possible. Not that this has helped Tanner, a clueless twenty-year-old trapped in a religious family in rural Alaska, where his options are limited and his life unformed. Finally, though, Tanner runs away from home, and lands an unlikely job as the assistant to science influencer Victor Bickle. Bickle has just landed a spokesman job for CWC, the company that dominates circuit transport and one of the world’s most powerful corporations. Suddenly affluent in a vibrant global society, Tanner is finally on a path to finding himself, embracing the new work, social, and romantic opportunities his stultified younger self could never have imagined. But, well, something is wrong with the world: the days are gradually getting shorter, and while many speculate that the circuit may be responsible for increasing the velocity of the Earth’s spin, everyone is too distracted, industrious, and vested in the system to do anything about it. Elsewhere, Winnie — a California teen who gets roped into anti-circuit protests with her small friend group — similarly finds herself coming of age in a society in denial. As Tanner and Winnie struggle into adulthood, they realize that the joys and frustrations of their personal lives will forever be overshadowed by deteriorating global conditions well beyond their control.
Normally, I would say a debut novel has no business being this great, but Circular Motion truly is — phenomenal, even. I suppose it should come as no surprise that it would come from the pen of a new writer, someone young enough to understand, first-hand, the psychology of coming of age in a world of accelerating breakdowns. “The circuit,” after all, is a metaphor — for climate change, for environmental breakdown more broadly, for the relentless churn and rampant destruction of capitalism. Foster never makes the exact parallel explicit, nor is the message preachy. In fact, the central worldbuilding conceit is so wild, and couched it in such colorful, funny craft — reminding me at times of the fanciful idea fiction of Paul Di Filippo or Rudy Rucker — that the seriousness of the novel sneaks up on you. And then, repeatedly, breaks you with heartbreaking insight into the impossible mental health battle that living in the modern world requires — really for anyone paying attention, but especially for someone young, born into a world so systemically, irreparably messed up. Foster never loses sight of the characters: their hopes and dreams and relationships and immediate needs. But those engaging stories, of Tanner and Winnie and their friends and coworkers, are brilliantly colored by the ongoing slow apocalypse, which the text increasingly pulls to the foreground as the protagonists’ awareness of it, and their own complicity in a system they never built, grows.
They say science fiction isn’t about the future, but the present. Circular Motion executes that maxim to perfection, a truly stunning piece of work that seeds an absorbing, inventive surface with powerful subtexts that deliver a gut punch of a conclusion..
Now and then, a novel comes along that profoundly vindicates my expensive habit of random bookstore impulse purchases. Alex Foster’s Circular Motion (2025) lured with with its cool cover and a gonzo science fiction premise, but ultimately won me over completely with its insightful, sideways strategy of commenting on the world through a speculative lens.
