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Jeremy Garber: New Literature in Translation: January 2021 Edition (0 comment)
Whatever your reasons, we’re certain you’ll find enough new books each month to sate even the most voracious literary appetite...
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Radiance

by Catherynne M Valente
Radiance

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ISBN13: 9780765335296
ISBN10: 0765335298



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Synopses & Reviews

Synopsis

Radiance is a decopunk pulp SF alt-history space opera mystery set in a Hollywood-and solar system-very different from our own, from Catherynne M. Valente, the phenomenal talent behind the New York Times bestselling The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of Mars. For this is not our solar system, but one drawn from classic science fiction in which all the planets are inhabited and we travel through space on beautiful rockets. Severin is a realist in a fantastic universe.

But her latest film, which investigates the disappearance of a diving colony on a watery Venus populated by island-sized alien creatures, will be her last. Though her crew limps home to earth and her story is preserved by the colony's last survivor, Severin will never return.

Told using techniques from reality TV, classic film, gossip magazines, and meta-fictional narrative, Radiance is a solar system-spanning story of love, exploration, family, loss, quantum physics, and silent film.


5 1

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Average customer rating 5 (1 comments)

`
Steve Gerken , October 20, 2015
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.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780765335296
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
10/20/2015
Publisher:
TOR BOOKS ST MARTINS MASS
Pages:
432
Height:
8.56 in
Width:
5.80 in
Thickness:
1.50
Illustration:
Yes
Author:
Catherynne M Valente
Author:
Catherynne M. Valente
Author:
Catherynne M.Valente
Subject:
Science Fiction and Fantasy-A to Z

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  • New, Trade Paperback, $16.99
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