Reading the Hugos: Novel

Welcome to the first article in our Reading the Hugos series, 2019 edition! I often joke that the Hugo Award Season is eternal and that is only half of a joke because there is only a small breath between the announcement of the winners in August and the end of the year when we start thinking about what the best books of the year may have been, and that leads directly into submitting our nominating ballots and the cycle begins anew.

Today we are going to take a look at the six finalists for Best Novel. This year three of the finalists were on my nominating ballot and I had named The Calculating Stars my top novel of 2018.  This is also a rare year in which I have already read all of the novels on the ballot before the finalists were announced, which is awfully convenient for me to put together my own Hugo ballot.

In a sense, this year's Hugo race is wide open because after N.K. Jemisin's Best Novel trifecta, she does not have a novel on the ballot, though everyone except Mary Robinette Kowal and Rebecca Roanhorse have been Best Novel finalists before. Kowal, of course, has three Hugo Awards in other categories, Roanhorse has one, and both Kowal and Roanhorse are previous winners of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Suffice it to say that this category is stacked.

Let's take a look at the finalists, shall we?


The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)
Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan)
Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)

Record of a Spaceborn Few: I dig that each of Becky Chambers' three novels have reasonably been standalone stories. Record of a Spaceborn Few focuses on that segment of humanity that took to the stars, but then never left the ships when so many then spread to new stars. A tightly contained story, Record of a Spaceborn Few deals with the responsibility of the individual to a community. This is slice-of-life science fiction. It could be set anywhere, but is far more interesting when in a more austere environment, especially one which failure for everyone to do meaningful work could cause the failure of a system.

I thought this was a much stronger novel than A Closed and Common Orbit (A Hugo Award finalist in 2016) and a pure delight to read. The only thing Record of a Spaceborn Few has working against it is that this is an incredibly stacked ballot.

Space Opera: Space Opera has been described as Eurovision in Space and as a spiritual successor to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is a hell of a lot of expectation to live up to. For the most part, Catherynne Valente hits her mark. In some ways, I admired Space Opera more than I loved it. It's been a while, but I remember the opening of the novel to be a touch longer to get going than I was looking for. Once it does and we get to that Intergalactic Grand Prix, though, Space Opera is a pure delight through and through. (my review)

Revenant Gun: Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate novels are a looser trilogy than I would have expected. There is a larger story in play, but Revenant Gun picks up some nine years after the events of Raven Stratagem and shifts the viewpoint to Shuos Jedeo (the infamous dead general) reborn as a seventeen year old with no memories of who he would become - which is interesting because it raises a question about whether inherent genius is enough to accomplish a goal or whether it is the sum or later experiences that exploits and develops that genius.

Revenant Gun is a strong ending to a truly unique series. In some ways the closest comparison I have is Ann Leckie's Ancillary novels, but that doesn't line up exactly. This is a fascinating novel and extremely strong conclusion to the trilogy. I'd be curious how well Revenant Gun would stand on it's own. It's one of two third novels in a series, but the only one that is not a true standalone (Record of a Spaceborn Few is a standalone in a series). It may not fully standalone, but Revenant Gun is a standout. (Adri's review)

Trail of Lightning: I've mentioned this before, but if "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience" was the announcement of Roanhorse's emergence on the scene (it did win all of the awards after all), Trail of Lightning was the exclamation point confirming that she was a major talent. It also marks a rare appearance of urban fantasy on the Hugo ballot and a well deserved one.

Trail of Lightning is a badass novel, full of driving energy and it was a raw delight to discover Roanhorse's Sixth World. (Paul's review)

Spinning Silver: Despite being a fairy tale retelling written by Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver shares almost nothing in common with Uprooted. Tonally, thematically, and stylistically, these are distinct novels as different from each other as they can be. The one thing they truly share is that they are excellent and one of the best novels of their respective years.

As part of her review, Adri wrote "As a technical accomplishment, it's excellent (except for the awkwardly stereotyped autistic-presenting character), hitting a perfect fairytale tone that weaves multiple character's lives together in a compelling way. There's plenty of kindness and positive relationships, especially between women and across cultures, to keep a reader company even during the story's darker turns. I recommend picking up Spinning Silver with eyes open and critical faculties engaged: much like that dark forest at the edge of the town, its not a place to be taken lightly, no matter how lovely it may look from the outside." (Adri's review)

The Calculating Stars: When I wrote about The Calculating Stars last year, I said that "More than just achieving a sense of wonder, the science of The Calculating Stars is magic. Kowal brings the dream of spaceflight beyond the page and into readers' hearts." There were plenty of excellent novels published last year and every novel on this ballot is worthy of recognition and are among the best of the year. For me, for my money, The Calculating Stars is the class of the field.

Also from my review, "It's not just Elma overcoming everything stacked against her that makes The Calculating Stars such a fantastic read, it's the completely thrilling mundanity of a countdown towards a launch. It's the checklists and the waiting. It's tremendous and exhilarating. We've been on this journey with Elma for some four hundred pages and The Calculating Stars is beyond a sense of wonder. I'd say that it's magic, but it's science. It's near perfection." (my review)


My Vote:
1. The Calculating Stars
2. Spinning Silver
3. Trail of Lightning
4. Revenant Gun
5. Space Opera
6. Record of a Spaceborn Few


Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Nanoreviews: Jade City, Moon of the Crusted Snow, Space Opera

Lee, Fonda. Jade City [Orbit, 2017]

Any commentary on Jade City which does not mention The Godfather is avoiding the the obvious comparison. The thing is that even though the comparison is obvious and easy does not mean that it isn't apt and on point. Jade City is the story of two rival gangster clans vying for control of Janloon, a city of on the island of Kekon. The No Peak and Mountain clans control neighborhoods and collect tribute / protection money from businesses in their districts and are in a perpetual state of armed rivalry with each other for more territory and resources.

Fans of crime and mob fiction will find plenty to love here. The setting of Jade City feels much like a 1970's era city and the novel plays out like The Godfather with Magic. The novel is told much more from the perspective of the No Peak Clan, so the characterization there is much stronger, coming across as both familiar and fresh. To give balance to the narrative, in just a few bold strokes, sentences, and scenes, Fonda Lee absolutely nails down two major characters of the Mountain Clan and breathes greater life into the war between clans.

Jade City is one of the best novels of 2017 and my only regret is that I did not read it earlier so I could have nominated it for all of the awards.
Score: 9/10

Rice, Waubgeshig. Moon of the Crusted Snow [ECW Press, 2018]

Imagine something goes wrong. The power goes out, phone lines and cell towers are down, an isolated community becomes completely shut off and forced to be self reliant during a hard northern winter. There are bare hints of the wider world and whatever the greater societal problem is has little bearing on the lives of this Native community.

Moon of the Crusted Snow tells the story of a remote Anishinaabe community in northern Canada. Knowing a novel is post apocalyptic sets up certain expectations in the reader and Waubgeshig Rice subverts those. This is a novel of quiet survival, of social pressure and changes in the face of disaster, of community, of maintaining a way of life in the face of what otherwise seems like the impossible. In a sense, Moon of the Crusted Snow reminds me a bit of When the English Fell, David Williams' novel of a collapsing world told from the perspective of an Amish community.

I appreciated the deliberateness of the storytelling, how tight the novel is to limited character perspective. It would be so easy to reveal too much of what the wider global (or even regional) story might be, but Rice holds back and Moon of the Crusted Snow is all the stronger for it.
Score: 7/10

Valente, Catherynne M. Space Opera [Saga, 2018]

The most common reference point for Space Opera is the legendary Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a novel of galactic absurdity. It was a bold statement the first time I heard it made and it remains a bold statement now that I've read Space Opera. The thing is, it is not an unreasonable claim that Space Opera is today's successor to Douglas Adams' classic. Now, only time will tell is Space Opera holds up in decades to come or if we'll talk about Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes in the same tones that we do Arthur Dent, Marvin, and Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Valente's novel is Eurovision in Space and it is absolutely delightful and once Valente gets Decibel Jones to that Megagalactic Grand Prix, the novel kicks into high gear and maximum absurdity with high entertainment and real emotion. It's one hell of a novel.
Score: 9/10


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Summer Reading List 2018: Joe

There are many things in this life which I really, really like. Two of them are reading books and making lists. A third would be making lists about reading books. Strangely, I'm not sure if I want to read a book about making lists, so we'll just move right on from there, shall we?

It is something of a tradition here at Nerds of a Feather to post one's Summer Reading List. Now, since I've been adulting for quite a number of years, the concept of "summer" doesn't have quite the same cache for me as it might have two decades ago. I have to go to work in July much the same as I do in February. And while the summer does mean more trips up to the family cabin, now that I have a child, some of that time spent reading on a swing overlooking a lake with a beer in my hand is going to be spent playing with my children. This is not a bad thing.

With all of that said, I do rather enjoy making lists about books. Nerds of a Feather is a genre blog, so while I plan to continue to read more non fiction each year and I've been reading an increasing amount of non SFF fiction, I do still get through more than one hundred books each year, so what I'm going to highlight is some of the science fiction and fantasy I plan / hope to read this summer.

For those keeping score at home, I have read four of the six books I have listed in both 2016 and 2017. I have decided against listing those books here, even though I do plan / hope to read Kate Elliott's The Gathering Storm, Katharine Kerr's Days of Blood and Fire, and Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber.

1. Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente

Are there readers of this blog who don't know about Catherynne Valente's gonzo-awesome-Eurovision-in-Space novel? It hardly seems possible at this point because if you want to talk about a novel that has completely blown up in all the places I see online, that's it. Every time I see something more about Space Opera, the buzz inside my brain gets louder and louder to the point that in a year which does not have a new N. K. Jemisin novel (go read the Broken Earth trilogy), Space Opera has risen to become the Must Read novel of the year.


2. King Javan's Year, by Katherine Kurtz

It's been a year since I last wrote an entry in my Reading Deryni series (The Harrowing of Gwynedd). I am long overdue to revisit the Eleven Kingdoms. King Javan's Year was the first Deryni novel I read, which is one hell of a novel to start the series with. It was here I learned Kurtz would build up a novel of hope and then send it all crashing down in blood and horror. Perhaps because he was my introduction to this world, Javan has remained one of my favorite characters over the years. I can't say that I'm hesitant to read this because I know how it all shakes out because I included Camber the Heretic in my re-read and to paraphrase a point I made about that novel, George R. R. Martin doesn't have anything on Katherine Kurtz. I think it is rather that re-reading King Javan's Year means that my re-read is almost to an end and I don't have this foundational and formative novel to look forward to in the immediate future.

3. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Late last year I started to read Le Guin's Hainish novels and because it's the way I'm wired, I started with her earliest published volumes: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions. Now it's time to get to the heavy hitters of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, two novels which have loomed in and over my consciousness of science fiction for almost as long as I have known about science fiction as a genre with a history.  I have owned the copy of The Left Hand of Darkness sitting on a pile of books next to  my bed for far more years than I am comfortable admitting. It's well past time to remedy this.

4. Stretto, by L. Timmel Duchamp

I first read Duchamp's excellent novel Alanya to Alanya back in 2008 and worked my way through the Marq'ssan Cycle into July 2010 when I read the fourth volume, Blood of the Fruit. I can't say why I held off reading Stretto for these eight years, but I have. The Marq’ssan Cycle, as a whole, is a deeply feminist series of social and moral ideas played out in bold and clear strokes with characters actively conscious of motivation, identity, and theory. The ideas here are what is important. I may need a refresher on the series so far, but I'm ready to finish this one up.

5. Company Town, by Madeline Ashby

This first hit my radar back in 2016 (when it was published) and the word was that the book was damned fantastic. Far be it for me to complain that a novel I've never read seems to have been under-read and under-appreciated, but the sense that I have is that Company Town is both under-read and under-appreciated (though, fully appreciated by those who did read the novel). Company Town has been on my "to-read" list since before publication and it's time to move it up. 

6. A Shadow In Summer, by Daniel Abraham

These days Daniel Abraham is best known for being one half of the writing team behind The Expanse, James S.A. Corey. Back in 2006 he published his first epic fantasy novel, A Shadow in Summer. It received an immense amount of praise, if not the sales to follow. I bought the first two books in the series shortly after publication, but as happens all too often, never cracked the cover. Perhaps this summer is a good time to remedy that.




POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. 

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Ireland, Justina. Dread Nation [Harper Collins]
Publisher's Description

At once provocative, terrifying, and darkly subversive, Dread Nation is Justina Ireland's stunning vision of an America both foreign and familiar—a country on the brink, at the explosive crossroads where race, humanity, and survival meet. 

Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever.

In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead.

But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It's a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.

But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston's School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose.

But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies.

And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems. 

Why We Want It: Per the author, Dread Nation is a post-reconstruction novel about zombies and racism. Also, the cover. That cover is magnificent is as much a selling point as anything else I'm going to read about the book.

Miller, Sam J. Blackfish City [Orbit]
Publisher's Description

“Miller gives us an incisive and beautifully written story of love, revenge, and the power (and failure) of family in a scarily plausible future. Blackfish City simmers with menace and heartache, suspense and wonder. Plus, it has lots of action and a great cast of characters. Not to mention an orca and a polar bear!” —Ann Leckie, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards 

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population.

When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.

Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection.  

Why We Want It: I'm not as familiar with Sam Miller's work, though the praise I've seen for his last novel, The Art of Starving, is immense. This was has piqued my interest. There's an orcamancer. That's awesome.

Newman, Emma. Before Mars [Ace]
Publisher's Description

Hugo Award winner Emma Newman returns to the captivating Planetfall universe with a dark tale of a woman stationed on Mars who starts to have doubts about everything around her. 

After months of travel, Anna Kubrin finally arrives on Mars for her new job as a geologist and de facto artist in residence–and already she feels she is losing the connection with her husband and baby at home on Earth.

In her room on the base, Anna finds a mysterious note, painted in her own hand, warning her not to trust the colony psychiatrist. A note she can’t remember painting.

When she finds a footprint in a place that the colony AI claims has never been visited by humans, Anna begins to suspect that she is caught up in an elaborate corporate conspiracy. Or is she losing her grip on reality? Anna must find the truth, regardless of what horrors she might discover or what they might do to her mind.  

Why We Want It: I'm a bit behind on my Emma Newman reading, but I loved Planetfall, Newman's novel of interstellar colonization, and though I should really read After Atlas next, I'm putting this here as a reminder to get to it. Before Mars is the third volume of Newman's loose trilogy and the strength of Planetfall has interested in all of it.

Scalzi, John. Head On [Tor]
Publisher's Description

"As much as Scalzi has the scientific creativity of a Michael Crichton, he also has the procedural chops of a Stephen J. Canell to craft a whodunit with buddy-cop charm and suspects aplenty—most of them in someone else's body." —USA Today 

John Scalzi returns with Head On, the standalone follow-up to the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed Lock In. Chilling near-future SF with the thrills of a gritty cop procedural, Head On brings Scalzi's trademark snappy dialogue and technological speculation to the future world of sports.

Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent’s head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.

Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.

Is it an accident or murder? FBI agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth—and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field. 

Why We Want It: At this point I'll read pretty much anything John Scalzi writes. I was slightly nervous going into Lock In because it was a significant departure from the space based awesomeness he normally writes, but I really enjoyed that book. Head On is the mostly standalone sequel to Lock In, so I'm on board. Plus, it's written by Scalzi. Of course I'm there!

Wallace, Matt. Taste of Wrath [Tor.com Publishing]
Publisher's Description

With seven books for seven sins, Taste of Wrath is the adrenaline-fuelled finalé to Matt Wallace's Sin du Jour series, which Chuck Wendig calls "a raucous, riotous tale of culinary madness"! 

Bronko and his team of crack chefs and kitchen staff have been serving the New York supernatural community for decades. But all that could be about to change.

The entity formerly known as Allensworth has been manipulating Bronko and his team from Day One, and the gang at Sin du Jour have had enough.

Old debts are called in, and an alliance is formed with the unlikeliest of comrades.

Some will die. Some will descend. And some will rise.  

Why We Want It: You've probably already seen my review of Taste of Wrath. I love this series with all of my twisted heart and Wallace nails the friggin ending. It's bittersweet, but it had to be. I heartily recommend every one of the Sin du Jour novellas and if you're only just hearing about them, I entreat you to go start with Envy of Angels and prepare yourself for the delight you are about to encounter.

Valente, Catherynne M. Space Opera [Saga]
Publisher's Description

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Eurovision in an over-the-top galactic science fiction spectacle from bestselling author Catherynne Valente where sentient races compete for glory in a universe-wide musical contest—where the stakes are as high as the fate of planet Earth.

A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented—something to cheer up everyone who was left and bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, and understanding.

Once every cycle, the civilizations gather for the Metagalactic Grand Prix—part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation of the wars of the past. Instead of competing in orbital combat, the powerful species that survived face off in a competition of song, dance, or whatever can be physically performed in an intergalactic talent show. The stakes are high for this new game, and everyone is forced to compete.

This year, though, humankind has discovered the enormous universe. And while they expected to discover a grand drama of diplomacy, gunships, wormholes, and stoic councils of aliens, they have instead found glitter, lipstick, and electric guitars. Mankind will not get to fight for its destiny—they must sing.

A band of human musicians, dancers, and roadies have been chosen to represent Earth on the greatest stage in the galaxy. And the fate of their species lies in their ability to rock. 

Why We Want It: I really don't know what to say if the first paragraph of the publisher's description doesn't do it for you. It really is the most amazing book description I think I've ever read.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Writer / Editor of the mostly defunct Adventures in Reading since 2004. Minnesotan. 

Microreview [novel]: Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

A cinematic tour through worlds that are and never were...

The Meat:

Formally innovative and stylistically daring, Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente takes a lot of risks in its pursuit of slowly revealing a mystery among the stars, or at least among the planets of our solar system. Imagined here with the wonder and improbability of early film where the moon was a short drive away and where every planet was home to different delights, the novel mixes texts, compiles sources surrounding the disappearance of an entire settlement and the disappearance of one woman, Severin Unck, a woman whose entire life has revolved around making movies. From the earliest age she was captured on film by her father, a director of ridiculous (though awesome-sounding) gothic horrors. The form the novel takes makes for a book that I found a little difficult to pierce, at first. This is not a traditional structure, but it quickly establishes its game and by the end I was enthralled by the mosaic it created.

Severin becomes both the star of the story and it's greatest absence. She's a young woman striving to throw off the past, to make something for herself free of the fame that has followed her because of her father. She's someone who wants to be an artist and wants to do something meaningful and wants so many things, perhaps most of all to figure herself out. Her past is revealed in home movies, through her own exploits as a director, through the accounts of her friends, family, and lovers. What truly happened to her…well, the book does an amazing job of building that mystery, of showing the people left behind trying to make sense of it. Perhaps most telling and shocking is the project of her father to make a movie about her life and about her disappearance. To make sense of it.

The book is full of magic. Movie magic, I suppose, but magic all the same, and a nostalgic gleam over the solar system. These are the worlds as people imagined them, hanging up in the sky like foreign countries, no further away than China is to Europe. The planets are hilariously drawn up along national lines, Mars belonging to Russia and China, Pluto to America, Venus open to all because it is home to the callowhales, creatures whose "milk" is what allows humans to travel between worlds, providing all the nutrients they could ever need. And this early SF vision of the solar system cast as an alternate past is striking and quite charming. I fell in love with the romantic vision of it colliding with the dirty, often violent and chaotic reality.

And I think the book does a great job of exploring that space where the movie magic meets reality. Where even the magic of this alternate universe cannot cover the oppression and the exploitation going on. The riots and the extremes of the planets are only touched upon, after all, and yet those small caresses are enough to show that beneath the Hollywood glamour there is something dark and deadly. The secret of the callowhales is not one unique to the fictive world of the book, after all. That exploration often walks hand in hand with enslavement, with not only a lack of empathy or understanding but a conscious rejection of it in favor of something that seems so easy, so right. The mindset of the imperialist insisting his actions just because some sort of God does not put a stop to them.

And here we see an extension of that. Of course in the visions of early SF the planets are either virgin land waiting for us or else populated by monsters the brave Earthmen must subdue. This is captured brilliantly in the art seen within the novel, and the glimpses at the film plots and the radio serials are great, funny and depressing at the same time, because they promote a vision of the solar system that is much simpler than it is. Easy for advertisers to spin callowhales as the cows of space, but it becomes increasingly clear that's not the case, in the growing desperation of Severin's father, Percival, to explain what happened to her. It's telling of the craft of the novel that it can build so tightly to its climax using only found texts, bits and pieces of movies and scripts and recorded conversations. There is an air of authenticity this lends the novel, in good Gothic tradition, but it also plays with the idea of texts and truth, asking what is most true out of all of them, the texts that profess to be true or those sold as fiction.

In the end the novel captures the feeling of a time when space was full of new countries to explore. The setting is beautifully rendered even as it creates a dark and muddy place where the only things black and white are the movies. Life is not so simple, filled with shades and colors and luminance. It's a dense novel, challenging but rewarding and very, very good.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 8/10 

Bonuses: +1 for a pseudo-nostalgic science fiction that builds an amazing mystery, +1 for a risky structure and form that pays off big time

Negatives: -1 for a somewhat steep learning curve

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 "like looking into a callowhale's eye" see our full rating system here.

--

POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

REFERENCE: Valente, Catherynne M. Radiance [Tor, 2015]