How High We Go in the Dark

How High We Go in the Dark opens in 2030 as a melting Siberian permafrost releases a prehistoric virus, then follows the consequences across centuries through a chain of linked stories. A grieving scientist inherits his dead daughter's research. A euthanasia theme park engineers painless final days for dying children. A genetically modified pig, raised to grow human organs, becomes self-aware and faces its own mortality. A man finds his late wife waiting inside a digital afterlife. The pieces thread together into a single mosaic about a species learning to carry mass loss, and Nagamatsu uses each speculative premise the way Chiang does, as an instrument for measuring grief, memory, and the obligations the living owe the dead.