Radiance

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I didn't go to Sasquan looking for an interplanetary bender. Likely story, I know. I was minding my own business in a reading when an ARC of Radiance sidled up, intimating at everything I need -- the barest effervescence of hope tracing sinuous curves through the twin black velvets of avarice and ambition, wounded characters questing through fractured worlds, sparse lights lensing across mysterious pasts -- all wrapped up in a grand space opera, one with vast tracts of scenery, and plot all the way up to there. The story reeled me in with an alluring portrait drawn from a younger, more romantic era in our collective history of space fantasies. Thus enraptured, I was drawn across time and space in pursuit of mysterious ends, slaloming the curves of a narrative rediscovering its own beginning in the creation of its demise. At half three in the morning I emerged, alone, exhilarated, drained. EDITOR: Tell me you understand you're reviewing a novel, not some dame from a Hollywood noir flick. REVIEWER: Of course I understand. It's a matter of conveying the grandeur, the elegance, the essence of a work of art, and distilling from the experience of the art by the reader one representative drop imbued simultaneously with the power, the arrogance, the mystery, the innocence that is that gorgeous long drink from the well of-- EDITOR: Call it a novel. The art form has a name. Call it what it is. The reading audience deserves, nay demands, to hear that name. REVIEWER: Fine. You win. The novel. Radiance, the damn fine novel. And with that, dear reader, this review must come to a close. These brief cameos by Light and Mystery cannot do justice to the stars of this feature. Allow them instead to whet the palate for the main dish. The curtain awaits.