How About This…?
“OKAY, HOW ABOUT THIS?”
We are thrown in with this hook, an extension of the title but also the first line, literally reeling us in and we find out right away that the year is 2064 AD, “[or 100100 B-AI, to be precise].”
The dating of this novella is not something we’ve encountered before. We are but “proto-human readers” to a text written from the future, a text written by AI. Time is measured now not from the birth of the son of God, but from the birth of artificial intelligence.
And from a footnote, as footnotes are peppered throughout this novella, we learn that:
“the dates in this novella will be split thus: (1) pre-21st century dates will be left in their primitive BC-AD state; 2) dates in what was previously labelled as the 21st century era will be designated as B-AI in preparation for full AI dating to start in what had been listed as 2100 AD [0 AI…1 A-AI… 10 A-AI etc.”
How About This…? by Michael Mirolla is a craft of postmodernism, metafiction of futuristic feel. How About This…? situates one couple, Elspeth and Marybeth in the throes of a life-changing trajectory when a stroller with identical twins is left on their back deck. With the babies, a message warns the couple not to try and return them or the couple could be arrested for kidnapping.
The couple are secretly thrilled, they have wanted a family and thus their lives propel forward in a tangle of plot entry-points. From this inciting incident a story of a family surviving within a futuristic world, a world of technological evolution and the threat of the evaporation of the human voice.
The babies who are identical twins fixate the centre of conflict and plot arc. Both babies share a genetic abnormality that points to their abandonment. Named Ariel and Malak by their Mothers, the twins share a bond beyond physicality. Sheltered as best as can be from the society around them, Ariel and Malak grow into adolescence when their individual roads begin to fork.
A story of self-definition, gender orientation and love, Mirolla presents a unique and compelling coming-of-age novella. Mirolla is deemed to achieve a text with “the sharp edge of storytelling” by exploring artificial intelligence, gender fluidity and identity politics. A narrative written by software in a time when the human has lost the capacity to tell their own story. Perhaps, How About This…? is a cautionary tale.
How About This…? is the first encounter that I have had with Mirolla and a memorable one. I am intrigued by Mirolla’s craft of writing style and success of experimentation in mechanics, plot and structure. This novella is not one to take the reader by the hand and lead them cleanly through. The reader must possess a critical eye and open-mind to enter the text from various angles and dimensions. Another reviewer deftly noted that “the narrative is marked by false starts, revisions, and reworkings, mimicking what one might imagine a collective AI intelligence producing as it attempts to generate a story.” The novella is bottom-heavy with footnotes. It is compelling that the author himself professes that the footnotes can be taken in, or ignored, neither reading experience is necessitated. Some footnotes delve deeper into knowing the characters and plot, some footnotes reveal more than the prose itself. Other footnotes seem ludicrous, a distraction, until the reader can contextualize the format within the direction of an AI intelligence telling a story.
How About This…? plays with self-identity and society. In an interview on the novella Mirolla elaborates on the theme, “What does it mean to be human? What makes us essentially human? How does the individual consciousness interact with that of others? At what point can we state that a human being has been stripped of all the non-essentials that accrue over a lifetime? And how does the concept of creation come into the picture?” Mirolla articulates that he determines literature asks what it means to be a certain gender or race and that we are drifting from the core of our species, “what does it mean to be human?” The machine versus human, the machine of society, the technology and software that shapes our behaviour, he demands a wider scope of comparison, us versus them, or it? The novella also contemplates the relationship between “creator (author) and created (character), the writing process itself, the building of worlds rather than describing an already-constructed one.” It is apparent that the narrative-point-of-view is conscious of the reader, another layer of construction established as the story is interacted with, received and demanded to be made palpable or listened to.
Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael Mirolla is an award-winning Canadian author, editor, and publisher whose body of work spans more than two dozen novels, novellas, plays, film scripts, and collections of poetry and short fiction. His publications include The Last News Vendor, winner of the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award for Fiction, as well as three Bressani Prizes for the novel Berlin, the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue, and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads. His poetry collection At the End of the World was shortlisted for the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award, while his more recent works include the novella How About This…? and the poetry collection The Second Law of Quantum Complexity.
Mirolla has also served in several notable writer-in-residence positions, including at the historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, in Olot and Barcelona, Catalonia, and with the Regina Public Library. During these residencies he worked on projects such as The Second Law of Thermodynamics and How About This…?, refining the experimental and philosophical concerns that shape much of his writing. In 2025, he also served as Virtual Writer-in-Residence for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild.
Alongside his literary work, Mirolla is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Guernica Editions, where he continues to champion Canadian and international literary voices. He now lives on a farm near Gananoque in the Thousand Islands region of Ontario, on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory, sharing the rural landscape with a lively household of dogs, a cat, and family.
Published by At Bay Press, How About This…? aligns closely with the press’s commitment to thoughtfully crafted literary work. Established in 2008, At Bay Press has earned recognition as an independent Canadian publisher devoted to publishing original fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and experimental literature by both emerging and established voices. The press is particularly noted for its carefully designed books and its support of distinctive, boundary-pushing narratives that foreground creativity, literary experimentation, and diverse artistic perspectives.
Mirolla’s collaboration with At Bay Press is especially fitting given the novella’s metafictional structure, speculative atmosphere, and philosophical engagement with storytelling itself. How About This…? reflects many of the qualities the press champions: formally inventive prose, literary risk-taking, and psychologically layered narratives that resist conventional genre boundaries. Through this partnership, the novella joins a catalogue recognized for publishing intellectually adventurous Canadian literature while supporting independent literary culture within Canada’s small press community.
My reading of this novella worked through a process I was not expecting, and for this, it would be interesting to study this novel in a seminar setting. At first, I read both prose and footnotes, then, as the novella progressed, I read only the prose, letting the gaps remain open and my knowledge of plot details fall away. I later went back and took in the footnotes with the prose. I also researched the novel and its general reception and creation process. In this stage of reading, I reread the ending multiple times and even turned online conversations to flush through other reader’s interpretation of the ending and the twins' earthly presence.
The play with metafiction in this novella is another component that would make for compelling study in a seminar setting. In a discussion on metafiction in the podcast “On Creative Writing,” Mirolla pulls through elements of How About This…? submerged in a metafictional universe. Meta-fiction, the art of self-reference, sometimes an extreme of magic realism, a style of writing that makes explicit the structure of narrative and delivery of literary techniques.
Mirolla applies the elements of metafiction to How About This…?. The narrator speaks directly to the reader within the prose and footnotes commenting on plot structure and characterization. Mirolla even describes the experience as “virtual reality, joined with the possibility of AI-inspired writing. And I don't mean the full AI writing at this point, but what AI writing could become with its own world creation.” The novella captures the familiar within this complex of an AI matrix, relationships, love, conflict and family at the centre of the plotline, yet, propels the story forward in unfamiliar ways. There are the mysterious twins and ambiguous sexual identities evolving and finding themselves within the backdrop of a futuristic world.
The ending is not straightforward but leans towards ambiguity, nor does it clean things up. Much is left to inference and the reader’s own capacity. The metafictional reality of the novella begins to entrap the narrator as the story turns on itself. The narrator appears to lose control of the story, the characters and their situations overpower the plot. What appears as real shifts to construct, the narrator too, and the final tone is unsettling. There is a central theme, stories can consume their creators, imagination can destabilise the boundary between fiction and lived experience.
The fate of the characters becomes unstable. They slip from the narrator’s control. Their identities blur. They may not exist outside the act of storytelling, or, the narrator cannot contain them and they continue on beyond the confines of plotline. The novella pushes the reader not to ask what happens to the characters, but “what is a character when the story itself becomes unstable?” One footnote probed: “To accompany the ground-breaking code-busting ontological/phenomenological/epistemological/metaphysical series of holographic implants under the general title: Fictional Characters: If No One Reads Them, Do They Exist?” Mirolla avoids giving his characters fixed destinies because the whole work is about how fragile and constructed those destinies are. The characters end up in a kind of liminal state, neither fully concluded nor fully real, mirroring the narrator’s loss of control over the narrative itself.
One last aspect of interest to me in scrutinizing the ending and the beginning was the idea that the twins were never definitively revealed to be aliens, but the text absolutely invites that interpretation. There are hints. The twins often seem too knowing, as if they understand more than they should. Their behaviour can feel slightly off or uncanny, not quite grounded in normal human reactions. They sometimes function almost like agents of disruption, pushing the narrative in strange directions. Further, they profess almost supernatural powers of telepathy and astral-projection. But, any extraterrestrial existence is never fully confirmed.
The twins could be non-human observers or intruders, this existence contributes to the eerie tone set near the end of the novella. As a metafictional interpretation, the twins could represent forces outside the narrator’s control. Imagination, inspiration or even the author, an alien intruding into the story. As psychological interpretation, the twins may be the projections of the narrator’s mind as they embody instability, creativity or anxiety. There is no definitive answer. The twins could be extraterrestrial, yet, they function to push the reader to be more interested in asking why they feel that way rather than confirming it.
Elspeth epitomized their lives eloquently:
“To repeat myself: You and Malak and Mar have been a dream. A lovely dream. The perfect entanglement of particles to create the perfect dream. I couldn’t have wished for anything more. For a more perfect coming together.” A sigh. “But all dreams must end. All entanglements must fall away. Must collapse back to their basic state. So I’ll stop now. Get out of your way. Give you the opportunity to strike out on your own. Good-bye.”
The beauty of the text lies in the entanglement of the reader with the story as well. I wonder how well they will collapse back to a basic state after encountering a metafictional text like this? We can strike out on our own, conscientious of the potential unfolding of the future and just how much artificial software will shape our lives.
Thank you to Michael Mirolla, At Bay Press and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.
