Aug 05 2018

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

In John Sclazi’s first series of science fiction novels, Old Man’s War and its several sequels and companion volumes, the Milky Way near earth (well, near in interstellar terms) teems with life and spacefaring civilizations. Humanity has to make its way in a galactic neighborhood that’s full of life, and nearly as full of war. The Collapsing Empire concerns an interstellar human civilization at the other end of the Drake equation: nobody here but us. In this setting, travel between solar systems proceeds thanks to the Flow, something like an extradimensional river that enables interstellar travel in a matter of weeks and months. Ships maneuver to an entry shoal that is more or less stable in space, translate themselves into the Flow, and follow it to an exit shoal in the destination system. Communication proceeds at the speed of travel, as it did on earth in the ages prior to the telegraph. Moreover, Flow connections are not symmetric: a route from A to B does not necessarily imply a route from B to A. The geometry of routes means that some systems are more important than others. Within the story, the ruling power set itself up about a thousand years before the book’s opening by controlling the most important set of Flow connections and building its empire outward from there.

Over that time span, the Flow has been stable with notably rare exceptions. Many centuries ago, the connection to earth was lost. This bit of narrative convenience gives Scalzi a much freer hand in shaping the overall setting for his space opera, which is likely to run for at least three books. (The second in the set, The Consuming Fire, is scheduled to be published in October 2018.) In a more recent century, the Flow to the planet Dalasýsla collapsed. Cut off from the rest of humanity, the settlement of some 20 million people on Dalasýsla also collapsed within decades.

Although the book’s title mentions an Empire, and one of the leading characters is the new Emperox, the star-spanning polity is actually known as the Interdependency. Not only is the universe of this story bereft of other forms of intelligent life, there is precious little habitable real estate in the systems connected by stable Flow links. Most of humanity lives in artificial habitats, either in space or under domes on planets that are otherwise inhospitable to human life. Rather than attempting to make every colony autonomous, an expensive and probably unattainable proposition, the leaders of human colonization chose to make the settlements dependent on one another. The resulting web of settlement is stronger and more prosperous than a string of autarkies would be, and they stand or fall together. For the better part of a thousand years, that has been an advantage.

At the book’s outset, there are signs that the Flow is not as stable over the very long term as humanity has assumed. Over the course of the book, these signs turn in to certainty, but plenty of power players are willing to overlook the fact that fundamental and inevitable change is coming to human civilization.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/05/the-collapsing-empire-by-john-scalzi/

Aug 04 2018

Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

When the first character a book introduces is a boy named Isaac, and the two adults closest to him in the odd collective where he is growing up are Avram (Dr. Avram Dvali) and Mrs. Rebka, even this heathen knows the book is going to be about encounters with transcendence and possible sacrifices. Axis is about a number of other things as well, but that is the heart of the story.

Axis is the sequel to Spin, which won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2006. I read Spin back in 2007 (Doreen read it in 2017 and wrote about it here) and only remember the general gist of the book: the earth was placed into a time bubble, such that time passed much more slowly than in the rest of the universe, with seconds on earth corresponding to thousands of years outside the bubble. At the beginning of Axis, earth has been out of its bubble for about a human generation; during the spin billions of years passed in most of the rest of the universe. The same beings who put the earth into a time bubble also placed an Arch, spanning a thousand miles or so, in the middle of the Indian Ocean that serves as a gateway to another world, one that is not only suitable for human life but that appears to have been seeded with earthly organisms at a date in the distant past. People have been exploring and moving to this new world for a few decades, but it is still recognizably a frontier, and sparsely settled outside of one major city. During the time of the spin, humans on earth also figured out how to take advantage of the time differential and seeded Mars with life. They followed that up with a colony on Mars. It, too, was eventually put into a temporal bubble, so by the time of Axis humans from Mars are distinct from earth humans but not a separate species.

The action of Axis takes place on the New World beyond the Arch. Wilson first introduces Isaac, some of the people in the isolated commune where he is growing up, and a visitor named Sulean Moi about whom Isaac observes, “Like the others at the compound, she was interested in the Hypotheticals—the unseen beings who had rearranged the heavens and the earth.” (p. 12) This is the community most directly interested in transcendence, as represented in the book by the Hypotheticals. In the second chapter, Wilson offers a counterpoint with Lise Adams, recently divorced and slightly at loose ends but trying to unravel a mystery from her childhood, and Turk Findley, a charter pilot who hadn’t exactly precipitated Lise’s divorce but hadn’t been irrelevant to it either. Events pick up when an annual meteor shower that Lise and Turk have gone to a restaurant to see is accompanied by the fall of massive amounts of what looks like volcanic ash.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/04/axis-by-robert-charles-wilson/

Aug 04 2018

The Bone Witch (The Bone Witch #1) by Rin Chupeco

I really wanted this book to work, and here’s the main reason why it didn’t, at least for me: 17 year-old Tea is just so full of herself that there isn’t room for anything interesting to be on display. The narrative is split into two, as with Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles. There’s a first-person narrative of the hero growing up, and there’s a first-person narrative that intersperses those more interesting bits with the pov of an accomplished storyteller who is somehow drawn to the hero years on, after said interesting bits and, hopefully, before more interesting bits to come. Rothfuss’ series has the advantage of the interspersing sections featuring an intriguing cast who surround our hero, whereas Tea is all alone but for the entities she summons. Present-day Kvothe gets away with being elusive and uninterested because he is surrounded by the mild conflicts raised by his supporting cast. Present-day Tea is just… melodramatic and affected and deeply uninteresting in the way of all self-important teenagers.

Which is a shame because when the book is showing us Tea’s pov, growing up to discover she’s a bone witch and all that, she’s actually quite delightful. The relationship between her and her brother is one of the most convincing depictions of sibling loyalty I’ve ever encountered, and I really enjoyed the plot beats as they came up. But here’s the secondary problem: there’s a surprising lack of tension in this book. I thought the mystery of who was sabotaging Tea was quite elegantly plotted but poorly written, with virtually all the drama happening in the closing scenes. And even though I’m averse to love triangles in general, I thought that it was quite odd to have it alluded to only at the beginning and end of the book, and then for the characters involved to display very little attraction, much less affection, for one another over the course of the book.

I do like the world and viewpoint that Rin Chupeco has created, but I really do think that The Bone Witch would benefit greatly from more storyshowing in its storytelling. It’s very unlikely that I’ll pick up the sequels unless someone whose opinion I trust reads them, loves them and recommends them, but I am hoping that happens.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/04/the-bone-witch-the-bone-witch-1-by-rin-chupeco/

Aug 02 2018

Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha Wells

I very much enjoy hanging out with the highly introverted Murderbot, and actually found this installment of the series to be a little less slight than its predecessor, as Murderbot hitches a ride with an unmanned ship that turns out to be far more clever and sentient than expected. Murderbot is looking for answers, and with the help of ART, as the ship is nicknamed, Murderbot heads back to the mining planet where a massacre birthed Murderbot’s moniker. Needing a cover to get planetside, Murderbot hires out as a security consultant to a trio of somewhat naive researchers who find themselves in a standoff with a ruthless entrepreneur. Watching Murderbot protect the trio while still digging into the past — and uncovering a whole host of interesting new complications in this fascinating universe — makes for a fun, fast read that leaves you impatient for more.

And that’s part of my problem with this series so far: the fact that each installment is nowhere near a complete book. At about 150 pages each, these novellas are wildly entertaining but not, as they’re currently priced on Amazon, $9.99 worth of entertaining. Not that I begrudge the author her due, but I’m super glad for the public library and the ability to borrow this instead of having to buy. I would definitely consider buying all four novellas, once they’re completed, in a single volume, but as it is, it seems a bit of a cynical ploy for dollars. But hey, who am I to tell people how to spend their money if they like something?

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/02/artificial-condition-the-murderbot-diaries-2-by-martha-wells/

Aug 01 2018

Pacific Fire by Greg van Eekhout

Pacific Fire follows its predecessor, California Bones, as an adventure caper set in a darkly magical California that is both contemporary and off kilter. Transport within Los Angeles, for example, is all on boats in canals, the city a gargantuan Venice, and the head of the Department of Water and Power is a feared water mage.

The end of California Bones saw the political order of southern California upended. By the start of Pacific Fire, ten years later, a rough replacement has emerged, but one with enough internal strife that the overall position of the magic kingdom is weakening. Three of the major mages in Los Angeles agree to bury their differences and set themselves up as a ruling triumvirate by creating and, they hope, controlling a Pacific firedrake, a magical creature strong enough to both cow their internal rivals and deter outside powers including northern California and the United States.

Daniel Blackland, the protagonist of the first book, finds out about the plans because one of the would-be triumvirs does not actually want the plan to succeed but cannot openly show his hand for fear of deepening the chaos within the city. Daniel has spent the decade between books on the run from other magicians who want to kill him and eat him — in this world magical power resides in the bones and flesh of magical creatures, most definitely including wizards, and someone who consumes them gains their powers. He has also been raising Sam, a golem created from part of southern California’s former Hierarch and thus possessed of much of the Hierarch’s magic. It’s an open question which of the two would be a more nutritious meal for any rival fortunate enough to kill them both. Their tastiness as targets and Daniel’s own disposition keep the two of them on the run, at least until word of the firedrake comes to Daniel.

He believes that the firedrake will become a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of people he knows to be ruthless criminals, and resolves to put together a team to stop its creation. Before he has taken more than the first steps toward that goal, however, an attack gets past his defenses and puts him out of commission. Sam draws on his own magical abilities to save Daniel’s life, but he is in no condition to finish the mission. Sam resolves to take on the task himself, and the caper is back on, from the point of view of a new and less-experienced protagonist.

California Bones was dark in places — with magic based on eating other magicians, that was unavoidable — but there was also a certain glee in presenting the skewed world (hints about Disney, positing William Mulholland as a magician) and relative innocence in the heist story. In Pacific Fire, the setting is established, so I found less joy of discovery in this book. By shifting the perspective to Sam, van Eekhout adds a bit of a coming-of-age narrative, elides the problem of Daniel being more powerful than almost anyone else in California, and lets readers see some of the darker sides of Daniel that he does not necessarily realize about himself. Those aspects all deepen the series as a whole, but I missed the fun and inventiveness of the first book.

Pacific Fire is still a brisk caper, a tightly-wound adventure full of obstacles and reversals. Indeed, by shifting emphasis to Sam while keeping Daniel still in the mix, van Eekhout has given himself room for seriously changing one or both of his protagonists without prematurely ending the trilogy in its second book. The novel also gets stronger when Daniel recovers enough to set off in Sam’s wake to add his own abilities to the efforts to stop the creation of the firedrake. Fittingly, the book’s closing scenes are its best. Readers learn that some things were not as they seemed, while other truths were hiding in plain sight. It’s a fine ending for Pacific Fire and a good setup for the third book, Dragon Coast.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/01/pacific-fire-by-greg-van-eekhout/

Jul 30 2018

Talon of Scorpio (Shadowstorm #3) by G.T. Almasi

I love love love Alix Nico and her hilariously idiosyncratic voice and the crazy alternate universe she lives in (well, I love the rampant violence less, but it’s a nice reminder that our own world could always be worse, so.) She’s witty and damaged and reckless and loyal, and she’s a great person to hang an action-packed series like this on. I do rather wish that there hadn’t been four years between the pub dates of this and the preceding novel, as I feel like I forgot a lot more than in the two-year gap between the first two books in the series, but I did love so much how getting back into Alix’s first-person narrative was like slipping into a dress that still manages to be comfy despite being sexy as hell.

What I didn’t love was how prolonged some of the fighting got. I really do appreciate that G. T. Almasi is doing different styles of thriller with each novel in this series, but war chronicles, as this one was, can often drag as we race from battle to battle. While Alix’s personality and resilience are enough to keep you going, things start to feel a little repetitive even with the myriad inventive ways Mr Almasi dreams up to spatter gore across the page. On the plus side, he’ll be doing something different with Book 4! Which I assume is coming given the ending of Talon Of Scorpio? I’m really looking forward to it.

Oh, and kudos also to the way Mr Almasi deals with Alix’s ongoing PTSD, as well as to the adorable relationship she has with Patrick. I haaaaaaaate how crappy and superfluous love triangles are thrown into popular fiction for fake emotional tension, so the strength of the bond between Alix and Patrick feels refreshing even as it convinces. More more more please!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/30/talon-of-scorpio-shadowstorm-3-by-g-t-almasi/

Jul 25 2018

An Interview With Nick Setchfield, author of The War In The Dark

Q: I was dead impressed by your idea to fuse the Cold War spy and occult horror genres, a concept I had yet to come across before reading your book. How did The War In The Dark evolve?

A: As I discovered I’m actually following in the footsteps of a few people – Tim Powers, for one, who wrote Declare around 20 years ago. I didn’t know that book when I began writing The War in the Dark – I remember my heart plummeting when a friend told me about it! – but luckily the spy/occult genre’s still a relatively untapped seam, rich enough for many different stories and styles. The central idea of War came to me a while ago but adding the espionage element really made it catch fire in my imagination. I’m a huge Bond fan and I had so much fun blending that kind of vintage spy story with a demonic conspiracy. They fitted together beautifully.

Q: Karina is such a strong character in The War In The Dark. I’ve read that you were inspired to write her by the spy-fi heroines of the 1960s. If you had to pick just one, who would be your favorite spy-fi heroine and why?

A: It has to be Emma Peel in The Avengers. She was so ahead of her time – while also embodying her time. Deadly, accomplished, proactive, and yet killingly funny, too, brought to life with such wit by Diana Rigg.

Q: Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?

A: No particular audience in mind – just anyone who enjoys a good thrill ride and some scares in the shadows. I’m actually quite excited to discover some friends are taking the book on their holidays this summer. A beach read is a very noble calling, I think. Come on, get sand in my pages! But no Cornetto stains, please.

Q: What is the first book you read that made you think, “I have got to write something like this someday!”

A: I’m not sure I could pin it on a specific book, but as a kid I devoured the Doctor Who novelisations by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. There’s such a wonderful clarity and simplicity to those old Target paperbacks. I think they probably served as useful blueprints of how a story is constructed. I was absorbing their schematics at a tender age and it must have helped shape The War in the Dark.

Q: We usually like to ask writers what made them choose x genre as their means of expression, but The War In The Dark defies such categorization. Instead, I’ll ask which process you prefer: writing longform fiction or the articles you compose in your day job as editor/writer for, among other publications, SFX magazine?

A: Same process, different muscles and impossible to choose between the two, I’m afraid! I get a certain buzz from writing up an interview (especially if the subject’s as compelling as someone like Neil Gaiman or Russell T Davies, two of my favourite people to talk to) or riffing on a movie I love – and an equal satisfaction from digging into my headspace to write a piece of fiction. But it’s all putting words on a screen, praying they hit it off together.

Q: How did you learn to write?

A: I’ve always written: in school, at home. I used to borrow my dad’s manual typewriter and bash out science fiction stories on the kitchen table. I still have the muscle memory of hammering the keys and winding the page through the roller until the heart-filling satisfaction of a finished page. Seeing my words set down in type, and not my usual scrawl, was a potent thing. It made a book seem vaguely possible.

Q: Do you adhere to any particular writing regimen?

A: Given the day job I have to carve out time in the evenings and at weekends. I’m still typing at the kitchen table but here’s a peculiar psychological wrinkle – I have to sit in a different chair to the one I use when I’m eating. Ah, the brain, in all its mystery and majesty…

Q: Are you a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) or a plotter?

A: Always a plotter. I think that’s essential with thrillers. They need to be precision instruments. But while I had the broad strokes set down before I started writing this book I kept myself very much open to possibility, and there were a few detours along the way that I’m really glad I took. I think they enriched the story in the end.

Q: What can you tell us about your next project? Will it continue in the same vein as The War In The Dark?

A: It’s another adventure for Christopher Winter so yes, essentially the same vein as The War in the Dark – but a different year, different locations and some very different antagonists…

Q:  Given your experience in scriptwriting, would you consider pulling a Gillian Flynn and adapting The War In The Dark for the screen yourself?

A: Ha! I think the book as it stands is the movie in my head. And I’m way too attached to it! I’d love to see someone else take my story and make it work on the screen. That would be preposterously exciting – to see a whole team descend on it, from set designers to soundtrack composers. They’d have to throw me off the set.

Q: What are you reading at the moment?

A: Just about to begin Forever and a Day, the new Bond novel by Anthony Horowitz. And I’m also dipping into a collection of the great old Black Panther stories from the ‘70s (I’m an old school Marvelite!).

Q: Are there any new books or authors that have you excited?

A: I do like the sound of Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is also a fantastical spy story – and one that has such a wonderful idea at its core. And I’m hearing good things about Rosewater by Tade Thompson.

Q: Tell us why you love your book!

A: I finished writing it!

~~~

Author Links:

Twitter

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The War In The Dark was published on July 17th 2018, and is available from all good booksellers. My review of the book itself may be found here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/25/an-interview-with-nick-setchfield-author-of-the-war-in-the-dark/

Jul 24 2018

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich

I can’t even imagine the amount of work Svetlana Alexievich put into writing this book: not just tracking down, transcribing and editing the testimonies of these brave, undervalued women, but also the sheer weight of bearing witness to so much courage and heartache. The Unwomanly Face Of War is an exceptionally moving historical document written over the course of decades, and I’m pretty sure that’s the only way she could have borne it: by having time blunt the edges of all the emotion these women poured into her, allowing it to distance her enough to keep working and collecting and reading and writing this almost overwhelming deluge of valor in the face of tragedy.

When Germany broke their treaty of non-aggression with the USSR, the vast majority of the Soviet people thought the war would be over quickly. They didn’t know how badly Stalin’s purges had crippled the military, and as the war progressed, more and more women — who’d been raised all their lives to not only fervently love the Motherland but also to consider themselves equal in capability to men, regardless of what the men thought — seeing that their menfolk weren’t coming home, enlisted and demanded to be sent to the front, too. The USSR, as a matter of fact, had one of the highest percentages of women in the military in the 20th century, and certainly in World War II. Women were famously used as snipers and pilots, but were also active in every front-line military branch and specialty, from anti-aircraft artillery to armory to laundry, from medical aid to tanks to sappers who worked at demining long after the war was over. Women were also important elements of the partisan and underground militias as the Germans occupied more and more territory. These women were a crucial part of the Soviet Victory, but their stories were too often obscured and untold. They faced discrimination getting to their posts and discrimination coming home. Ms Alexievich set about fixing at least one wrong done to them: the feeling that they had to keep quiet about their wartime efforts, as if they had anything to be ashamed of simply for picking up the arms of their fallen comrades and fighting on to victory.

TUFoW is simultaneously an extremely readable book — credit to Ms Alexievich’s editing and prose — and a difficult book to get through. I cried a lot. It’s a terrific historical document that absolutely deserves a Nobel prize for its author. Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of the Russian literary style, but if you are more into it than I am, you will absolutely love this book (*cough*Doug*cough.) But if you have any interest in war, or in history, or in feminism, then I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Our interpretations after may be different (I do feel that Ms Alexievich was very gently disproving her interviewees’ ingrained sexism by giving a platform to the many different voices that showed, collectively, how important their femininity had been to preserving their humanity and fighting spirit) but I’d be greatly surprised if reading this oral history wasn’t a revelatory experience for everyone.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/24/the-unwomanly-face-of-war-an-oral-history-of-women-in-world-war-ii-by-svetlana-alexievich/

Jul 18 2018

Viva Warszawa by Steffen Moeller

Quite by accident, Steffen Möller has found himself one of the most famous contemporary Germans in Poland. He moved there in the mid-1990s for no particularly profound reasons — looking for work, looking for things to be slightly different, looking into a society that was changing rapidly, looking at a place that was at once nearby and distant — and fell into a role in the long-running soap opera “M jak Milosc” (L for Love).

He was cast as the unassuming German next door, and appeared in seven seasons of the show. He did not become a household name, but most definitely a familiar face for a large segment of the Polish population. (The show has run since the year 2000, and as of the end of May this year, 1377 episodes had been broadcast. By some measures, it is the most-watched drama on Polish television.) It was quite a change from the anonymous language teacher he was when he first came to Poland, but it does not seem to have affected the affable persona he shows in Viva Warszawa, his third book and his second about Poland.

As the title implies, the book is a very fond look at Warsaw, where he has lived for most of his time in Poland. Roughly speaking, he alternates between historical bits and chapters about particular areas or themes, with those largely based on his personal experience with the city. In contrast to many people born and raised in Poland, he not only loves the country, he quite likes it as well. After roughly two decades there, at the time of publication, he has seen considerable change and relates the continuities along with the new developments, helping the book live up to its subtitle Polen für Fortgeschrittene (Poland for Advanced Learners). For example, when he first moved to Warsaw, bicycling in the city was considered strange, dangerous, and possibly suicidal. Having biked from the city center into the countryside and then back again at the end of a two-week tour across northern Poland in 1997, I can attest to two of those three. In recent years, however, bike lanes have been added to the streets, and bike-sharing schemes have gained significant numbers of riders. Public attitudes have changed as well.

Möller is a genial companion as he ranges across the city, and lightly back and forth in time. He does not shy away from the many difficult issues in German-Polish relations, but he always addresses them in the context of specific people, and is generally optimistic about present and future. As with Viva Polonia, the book’s short sections and breezy tone make it fun to read. He wears his learning lightly, showing why he likes Warsaw so much, and inviting readers to join him in pleasure and exploration. Viva Warszawa!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/18/viva-warszawa-by-steffen-moeller/

Jul 18 2018

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

What if all of those 19th-century notions about the nature of the solar system were true? Venus is swampy and rainy, Mars is mostly dry but turns out to be good country for kangaroos, Neptune is covered by an immense and stormy ocean, the moon really does have seas. And more: the moons discovered by modern science are all present, most of them inhabitable, plenty of them inhabited by larger or smaller groups of humans. There are currents in the luminiferous aether that whisk ships to the outer reaches of the solar system in mere weeks. And still more: Pluto and Charon are joined by great, void-leaping vines, while nearly all of the worlds support indigenous life, if not life that the humans recognize as sentient. And yet still more: the people of all the worlds are crazy about movies, with Earth’s moon replacing Hollywood as the industry’s home, but the Edison family have locked down all the patents on color and sound, so most movies well into the 20th century — decades after the first crewed rocket flight in 1858 — are still black and white silent pictures.

That, more or less, is the setting of Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente, a book that is ultimately about transcendence, but along the way touches on filmmaking, gossip culture, growing up in an artistic family, growing up in a ruthlessly commercial family, art, truth, fiction, conventional morality, metafiction, and a few other things as well. There isn’t really a plot, or rather there are several and they add up to the story that Valente is telling about the setting she has devised and some of its most emblematic people. The book comes together like a documentary film, which is entirely fitting because one of Valent’s main characters is the documentary director Severin Unck, who is the daughter of the commercially renowned director Percival Unck.

Valente skips around in the timeline, with some scenes set just after the turn of the 20th century and others as late as the 1960s. She likewise jumps among numerous narrative forms: interviews, movie scripts, meeting transcripts, and several others in addition to narration that appears straightforward genre fiction at first but turns out to be something different entirely.

Severin is dead, or thought to be dead, presumed inhumed, at the book’s opening, although for much of its course she is a little girl navigating the moviemakers’ worlds from an unusual perspective. For what turns out to be her final project, she brings her regular crew of filmmakers to the site of a settlement on Venus whose settlers all vanished simultaneously. Similar things had happened on Mars and Pluto, decades earlier. Severin wants to unravel the mystery or, failing that, she wants to make a movie to show the rest of the worlds what they found when they went to have a look.

Radiance spirals around the time on Venus, showing it bit by bit, but showing the decades before as well as the effects of that visit on the survivors’ lives. Or possibly showing those effects; there are indications that some of the sections of the book are actually a movie (or movies) that characters in other sections are talking about making. The stories within the book are also about reaching toward transcendence, one of the things that can happen when that barrier is crossed, and the near impossibility of communicating back across it. It is a radiant ending to a book that isn’t quite like anything else.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/18/radiance-by-catherynne-m-valente/