In the mystical Valley of Spiraling Winds, deep in the mountains of Koʻolaupoko, Oʻahu, old memories stir.

Hawaiian writer Peter Britos explores the roots of contemporary Hawaiʻi through the lens of a dystopian future in this edgy, time-hopping novel. From a predicament in the future, the narrative plunges into the past to follow the journey of a Hawaiian-immigrant family through multiple generations spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The journey begins when veteran mnemo-navigator Estrella Kuemanu arrives in Waikīkī, ready to take a deep dive a thousand years into the past. She has the koko, the blood, the genealogical signature to make this dive. If the stories and intel are true, she must find Bishop Valdez and his sister Nalani—they may hold the key to preventing an apocalyptic prophecy from being fulfilled. Estrella has studied the lore, whittled the names into her drivepack; but she knows that's no guarantee. It’s a mess back there that deep in the past, what with those crazy-ass people so much like her own, driven by passions and curses, dumb luck both good and bad, dreams for the living, dreams of the dead.

Author Peter Britos brings a courageously fresh, indigenous sensibility to the science-fiction realm with this first novel from his multiplatform Spiral Jungle universe. Deliberately drawing from several storytelling traditions, including the epic poem and narrative practices unique to Hawaiʻi, the author presents this visionary tale with rich and lyrical language. Hyperrealism, sharp socio-political satire, and black humor combine with the poetic, sensual, and mystical to create a spellbinding world of memorable characters.

This groundbreaking novel takes on some of the most pressing cultural, political, and ethical issues of our times with an innovative approach and critical focus. It strips away popular, clichéd representations of the Hawaiian Islands and its peoples and reimagines Hawaiʻi’s history and mythology in profoundly beautiful and relevant ways.

This work by Peter Britos is some of the most interesting extrapolative fiction written in and about Hawaiʻi to date—a truly exceptional, outsized, audacious, brilliant piece of writing, on the imaginative and conceptual scale of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

The writing is polished, strikingly lyrical in places, and able to take the reader viscerally on thought-activated machine rides down waves the size of mountains; changes in the narrative technique and frames of reference correspond with great sophistication to different places and temporalities. Waikiki in 3300 A.D. emerges vividly, and the local (realist) sections of the novel, set for the most part in the present, are on the level of the best place-based writing to emerge in Hawai‘i in terms of their representation of Hawaiian and local speech, culture, and history.

There is embedded across these imagined times a sense of the constantly evolving but cross-temporal spirals of Hawaiian culture, as it faces different layers of contact and colonization. This novel layers—in ways that alternate between action-packed, historically reflective, and humanly poignant—questions of what is happening with Hawaiian families and local culture under pressure with what will become of Oceania as a region, whose oceans are projected as a breadbasket of the world, as technology, culture, the environment, and humanity merge and spiral in time.