Gregory Coles

Review: The Limits of My World

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The Limits of My World, Gregory Coles. Loveland, CO: Walking Carnival Books, 2023.

Summary: A small group of people from two races encounter, and in the process, discover the challenge of communicating across two languages and a larger reality beyond their known universe.

Tei and Kanan are Fledglings hoping to be selected as Finals. Only ten from each class are selected, the rest being archived. Kanan is a runner who can complete a circuit of the Universe they inhabit in 17 minutes. Tei delves deeply into the archives. Both expect Kanan to be selected. Instead, neither are. Then something strange happens. They announce a special Final is to be selected, an Interpreter to learn the language of beings that exist in the world above, called Natchers. Tei, of all people, is selected, for his deep delvings into the archives, from which he will learn the language. Tei and Kanan have made a promise to find each other, but Kanan will be archived. Except she uses her speed to elude capture, finding herself in a meat locker among remains without the protective shell-like skin that has already been partially stripped off her.

Suddenly she finds herself in the world above with the “Natchers” except they don’t call themselves. They speak of themselves as humans, what Kanan’s race calls itself. The people she finds herself among call Kanan’s race the Cyborgs because of the shell-like covering called “skin” worn over what the “Natchers” call skin. She discovers why communication between the two peoples is so impossible–almost everything in one language means something else, sometimes just its opposite. “Sorry,” meant genuinely is considered a word of contempt.

Both Tei and Kanan, unaware of each other, learn that the two races depend on each other. Mahlah, a swimmer, leads a raid to obtain medicine desperately needed from the Cyborgs for an ill child, using re-skinned Kanan to gain access. Eventually Mahlah is captured by the Cyborgs and is “allowed” escape with Tei. Meanwhile, Tei has learned how a single group became two races, and that the Nothing beyond, is not nothing but a larger reality and end of a story they no longer comprehend. The contact Tei and Kanan have with the Natchers, and what they learn implicate them as traitors in the eyes of both races and yet point to truth both races desperately need to understand. As Coles writes, “Truth must be a fragile thing if it only survives in one language.”

Gregory Coles has done both some incredible worldmaking and explored how languages shape societies, and how truth is perceived. And as he puts it toward the conclusion of the work:

“The walls of the human world–the boundaries of their worlds–kept them from seeing the one sight that might have opened their eyes” (p. 322).

This is Gregory Coles first work of science fiction. It is the Foreword INDIES Award Finalist for science fiction in 2023, Kirkus Reviews Starred Pick, and a PW Booklife Editor’s Pick. I thoroughly enjoyed the twisty plot, the development of Tei, the descriptions of the Universe they inhabit, and the rich exploration of how language works. I hope I will see more from this writer.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: No Longer Strangers

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No Longer Strangers, Gregory Coles, Foreword by Jen Pollock Michel. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021.

Summary: A personal memoir on struggling to fit in and giving up on belonging to pursue Christ, and in the end, finding both.

Gregory Coles grew up struggling to fit in. He was a third culture kid, American-born but raised in Indonesia, returning to the U.S. in college. He grew up pudgy, the least athletic kid in most rooms, thinning out in adolescence. He was a bit of an egghead and he holds a doctorate in English. He is also a Christian, openly gay, and celibate, about which he writes compellingly in his first book, Single, Gay, Christian which I reviewed in 2017. You can see how he might struggle with fitting in.

And yet in his pursuit of Christ, he found belonging as well. But first, something of the story.

The book is written as a kind of a memoir, on the theme of being an alien, an image at once biblical, one that fits his story, and that he plays with in his “Notes From an Alien Anthropologist” at the beginning of each chapter. He traces his family story of how he became a TCK (Third Culture Kid), raised by Jesus movement converts who pursued mission work in Indonesia. He speaks with nostalgia about playing Pooh sticks with friends by the open sewer near his home. He describes airports as his favorite place–where everyone is a misfit and all are passing through and his struggle with national anthems, when one connected more with where he’d grown up than that of the country whose passport he held, and none connected with the one nation he’d given total allegiance to that had no national boundaries.

As a first year college student, he struggles with the question of how he can be from Indonesia with white skin. Three years later, a Christmas trip home results in a case of dengue fever, meaning he only return at the risk of a re-infection that would be far worse, closing the door on that part of his life.

In the second part of the book, he moves from the idea of belonging in a place to belonging with others. He describes the wedding of his boyhood friend Zack to Anna, both the joy and loss, and a wonderful visit to Chicago and a hilarious bingo game he and Anna made up during a Lord of the Rings marathon that sealed a new friendship. Carrie grew up in Indonesia, she and her husband Evan welcomed Greg into their Santai (Indonesian for “relax”) Sundays. There is a wonderful friendship with the Hennings and their boys Grant and Max, who at one point turn a painful conversation after Greg’s “coming out” into “the best Monday ever.”

The last part of the book is about “belonging to.” It begins with his willingness to let go of the importance of reputation to follow Christ when his first book was published, and to know there was One to whom he would always belong. He recalls his habit of giving out carrot sticks in high school, the people he came to know, and the realization that neighboring is giving with no thought of return. He writes of a critical reviewer who became a friend because of her review of his book and concludes with the tattoo that became his Ebenezer of Christ’s love for him.

This is a memoir that is funny at one moment, that takes one (at least this pudgy egghead) back to childhood at another, that catches you up with tears, and sparkles with the joy of one who has risked all to follow Christ’s call only to discover belonging on the other side of loss–of a congregation who does not let him go, of friends who welcome him for dinner and laundry and origami, and of a Christ who never stops loving. Through his own story, he points the way for all of us “aliens” who long to belong.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Single, Gay, Christian

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single gay christian

Single, Gay, Christian, Gregory Coles. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017 (forthcoming August 22, 2017).

Summary: An autobiographical narrative of a young Christian who becomes aware of his attraction to other men, his struggles against this within a Christian context, his experiences of “coming out,” and how he has decided to follow Christ through all of this.

This book had me at the first page. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t quote so extensively, but I know nothing better to give you a sense of Gregory Cole’s story, and of his exquisite writing:

“Let’s make a deal, you and me. Let’s make promises to each other.

I promise to tell you my story. The whole story. I’ll tell you about a boy in love with Jesus who, at the fateful onset of puberty, realized his sexual attractions were persistently and exclusively for other guys. I’ll tell you how I lay on my bed in the middle of the night and whispered to myself the words I’ve whispered a thousand times since:

“I’m gay.”

I’ll show you the world through my eyes. I’ll tell you what it’s like to belong nowhere. To know that much of my Christian family will forever consider me unnatural, dangerous, because of something that feels as involuntary as my eye color. And to know that much of the LGBTQ community that shares my experience as a sexual minority will disagree with the way I’ve chosen to interpret the call of Jesus, believing I’ve bought into a tragic, archaic ritual of self-hatred.

But I promise my story won’t all be sadness and loneliness and struggle. I’ll tell you good things too, hopeful things, funny things, like the time I accidentally came out to my best friend during his bachelor party. I’ll tell you what it felt like the first time someone looked me in the eyes and said, “You are not a mistake.” I’ll tell you that joy and sorrow are not opposites, that my life has never been more beautiful than when it was most brokenhearted.

If you’ll listen, I promise I’ll tell you everything, and you can decide for yourself what you want to believe about me.”

In succeeding chapters, Coles unfolds, often in a self-deprecating yet not self-hating fashion, his growing awareness that he was gay, his silence and attempts to cover this up by dating girls and even of trying to awaken heterosexual desires through them. He describes the scary and wonderful moment he comes out to his pastor, who listens, and loves, and keeps on loving.

We trace with him his journey to reconcile his faith, his orientation, his understanding of biblical teaching, weighing but rejecting “affirming” interpretations, which precludes for him acting on his gay attractions by pursuing intimacy with another man, and what it means for him to believe that God has nevertheless made him good.

He helps us hear what is often said in churches that affirm a “traditional” view from the perspective of a gay person. I cringed here as I read things I’ve said. He also leads us into a broader conversation about sexuality and how the fall has affected it for all of us, gay or straight.

He speaks about his choice to live single, both the heartache, and the joy. He raises the question of views of discipleship that never involve suffering or self-denial. He casts a vision for a life that is full, and has a unique capacity for relationships because of who he is as a gay man. Where the church often sees LGBTQ persons as a threat, Greg helps us see persons like himself as a tremendous gift.

Coles speaks with a voice of conviction without dogmatism. He speaks for himself and his own journey, allowing that others might conclude differently. As he writes in his introduction, he tells us the truth about himself, and lets us decide.  He doesn’t see himself as any kind of role model but simply as a “half-written story.”

I deeply resonated with his comments about encountering the “are you side A or side B?” question. He writes, “I didn’t want to be reduced to a simple yes or no. I wanted a new side.” I find myself deeply in sympathy with him. And perhaps this book might take us a step closer to that new side.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.