The Kikiloa Chronicles by Erik D. Larson

An inventive, deeply personal journey across the multiverse, where the hardest thing to outrun is loneliness

“My experience of her song was a projection of mine unsung.”

The first novel in The Kikiloa Chronicles by Erik D. Larson isn’t easy to define. Part speculative fiction, part time-travel adventure, and part philosophical debate, it asks whether serendipity is enough to counter entropy. Heavy on snark and self-reflection, the novel follows Kikiloa—Kiki to her friends—a time surfer and the mother of humanity: Mitochondrial Eve, if you please. Beneath the philosophical ambition, however, is the painful desire to belong. 

Kikiloa isn’t a good main character. She lies. She’s manipulative. She’s selfish. She’s funny. She’s compassionate. She’s ancient. She’s fourteen. She’s hopeful. She’s cruel. Yet, she’s still loved by the people around her, and by this reader too, who never expected to love her. Or, truthfully, even like her. Kikiloa describes herself as a trickster but throughout the novel, the person she tricks most of all is herself. 

Kikiloa insists that what she fears most is the end of time. For someone whose lived since the prehistoric age and travels the multiverse, it’s an understandable concern. Only that isn’t quite true, as the novel slowly reveals that what she fears isn’t oblivion but loneliness. And loneliness is something Larson understands exceptionally well, layering it with smothered female rage and grief. From birth, Kikiloa is too aware of the world around her, unable to offer her thoughts and confined to what her body can provide.

It’s a disturbing duality of motherhood and repression, one that Larson elevates to an almost otherworldly degree. Kikiloa finds meaning in her role as humanity’s endless mother, even as it perpetuates her loneliness. Her children will never belong entirely to her, as she is forced to create more. Yet “Mother” is the one identity she can’t let go of because it’s the closest thing she has to a self. Larson handles that contradiction with remarkable restraint.  

The painful moments also feel the most real, and the novel weakens whenever it shifts its attention away from Kikiloa herself. It repeatedly turns to Hazel, someone Kikiloa sees as the next time surfer and ideal savior: sweet, selfless, and everything she believes herself incapable of being. If this were a story about time surfers saving the world, it could work, but it’s more intimate than that. Perhaps that’s the point: the story is at its truest when Kikiloa herself becomes honest, whether she’s willing to be or not. 

For all of its speculative ambition, The Kikiloa Chronicles is personal, intimate, and strongest when it forces Kikiloa to look at herself, whether in prehistoric Africa, the present day, or the countless timelines in-between. The pacing occasionally stumbles, lingering at times over theories of time travel and meaning before rushing toward a resolution that feels hasty. Even so, Larson never forgets the novel’s emotional center. However sprawling its ideas become, Kikiloa remains its heart.

It’s ironic that for a novel preoccupied with infinite universes and versions of us, The Kikiloa Chronicles succeeds most the more personal it gets. Every philosophical question ultimately circles back to Kikiloa herself: her loneliness, her aching need to be understood, and her search for meaning in a life that she’s convinced herself can only end one way. Kikiloa Chronicles isn’t quite a coming-of-age story. Instead, it’s the story of Kikiloa coming into herself—even at 200,000 years old.