Island Time

In the near-future setting of All You Can Kill, humanity continues to face timeless and familiar problems. People search for love, guidance, acceptance, someone to follow, and spaces where their beliefs can be validated. Despite technological and social advances, they look for answers to these existential concerns in all the wrong places. Playful, witty, and lightly sardonic, Pasha Malla’s multi-pronged satire may not offer much hope for where we’re all headed, but it has a riotous time envisioning what our destination might look like.

The book begins in medias res as the unnamed narrator and his inadvertent comrade, K. Sohail, find themselves drifting through the sky in each other’s arms —“as if we were dreaming the same dream.” Survivors of an off-page, undescribed incident, they are in a strange predicament, inexplicably aloft over the open water, without another soul in sight. As the mysterious force keeping them airborne dwindles, a...