Also a hindrance to Kaslin's serenity is the status of his parents, who were expelled to Chuudoku due to the criminal exploits of Kaslin's dad. Currently the family is poor and struggling. And just to top off Kaslin's misery, he's become the target of a school bully, a girl named Hilty. Hilty's folks are wealthy, and she's been equipped with all the latest bodymods, including poisonous fingernails that she likes to employ on Kaslin.

So when, one average school day, Kaslin is running away from his sadistic classmate and falls down a cavernous hole in a forest, he almost welcomes the danger. At least he'll be safe from Hilty. Or so he thinks, but she tumbles after him, Jill after Jack.

The tumble plops Kaslin and Hilty into a labyrinth of caverns filled with the weirdest "soap flakes." This powdery, granular substance is a kind of mutable "utility fog," capable of infinite uses upon receiving certain commands. As Kaslin, separated from the belligerent Hilty, begins intuitively to master these commands, he comes upon a spidery alien embedded in a solid portion of the soap flakes. He whimsically frees it. The alien instantly comes alive and summons others. Together, they remake Kaslin bodily and mentally into something more than human.

Upon escaping back to the surface, Kaslin has to explain to his mother what happened. Good trick, since he's not quite sure himself. She wants to hospitalize him. He escapes back to the cavern, and she follows, to be remade also by the aliens. But Kaslin is rather enjoying his fate. He's unique and special now, with odd powers.

So special and valuable, however, that Hilty's father, Mr. Mapworth, regards Kaslin as an economic resource ripe for exploitation.

And this is not even saying anything about the plans the aliens themselves might have!

A biomorphic odyssey

Ever since Alice fell down Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole, humans have been experiencing bizarre transformations in underground kingdoms. A major archaic example of such can be found in John Uri Lloyd's quaint and curious book Etidorhpa (1895). More recently, Jeff VanderMeer has employed this trope in his series about the city of Ambergris, a burg undermined by the fungal humanoids known as "gray caps."

In this, her first actual simon-pure SF novel, award winner Hoffman grabs hold of this potent motif and gives it such a wild, wooly and wonky workout that she sets a new standard for such tales. With polymorphously perverse gusto, she puts Kaslin through a quasi-erotic metamorphosis worthy of a John Shirley or Rudy Rucker book. (In fact, tomes such as Shirley's Silicon Embrace [1996] and Rucker's Frek and the Elixir [2004] are kissing cousins to Hoffman's novel.)

Hoffman starts the story literally on the run, and the pace never relents. There is no downtime in this narrative, either in the caves of the aliens or on the surface. Even when Kaslin is taken into the Mapworths' quiet apartment for quizzing and sleep, there are all sorts of Machiavellian schemes afoot. Ideas and plot developments flow fast and furious throughout.

Like Theodore Sturgeon and James Tiptree, Hoffman is bold and fearless with her psychological and emotional development of Kaslin and company, and not a few Freudian and Jungian complexes get a workout. The relationships between Kaslin and Hilty, Kaslin and his mother, Hilty and her father, and so forth, all undergo roller-coaster ups and downs, blossomings and reversals. (The sisters Hilty and Fidi might remind readers of the precocious and insouciant girls in James Schmitz's The Witches of Karres [1966].) Add in the kind of solid future-history backstory to be expected from, say, Robert Heinlein or David Gerrold, and you get a book that's rich and palpable, as well as being gonzo in the best sense.

Once you ingest Hoffman's mental soap flake of a book, you can never go home again.