David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was apparently partially inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which contains a series of first chapters of novels, all truncated at a cliffhanger. Mitchell takes this device but modifies it, so while there are six separate tales in Cloud Atlas, each has an ending, but also links to the other stories (novellas?). The linked palindromic structure is unique, but it works, particularly because each segment has a different style, which Mitchell segues between effortlessly. His skill here prevents each tale from reading as a pastiche, although the styles are identifiable.The six tales are, in order: the journal of an American functionary on a voyage in the South Pacific (ca. 1850), the letters of a debauched and disinherited English composer (1931), the travails of a plucky female reporter working to uncover a corporate scandal, written in the form of an airport thriller (ca. 1975), the memoirs of an aging and broke English publisher (ca. today), the interrogation of a clone in a dystopic future Korea (ca. who knows), and a tale around a campfire of a tribesman's life in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.
While the tales (often frustratingly) fail to gel entirely into a cohesive whole, this is one of the techniques that makes the novel work, as it prevents Mitchell from getting bogged down in explaining why or how this happened to Korea, to Hawaii, or exactly what Ewing was doing in the South Pacific, or how reliable of a narrator Frobisher is. This allows him to focus on the characters and the tale at hand, rather than spending too much time setting the scene, which is a hallmark of subpar science fiction.
For such an oddly structured novel, Cloud Atlas is a surprisingly easy read -- the only section that gave me difficult was the central section ("Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After"), as dialect with liberal usage of apostrophes and colloquialisms tends to make my eyes glaze over and my brain skip past sentences, much like the titular clouds. (Thankfully, the characters don't spend a significant fraction of their time watching the sky and engaging in pareidolia. Symbolism used is more subtle.) An absolutely worthwhile book.
