Severin Unck is the headstrong young daughter of a world famous film director. She has inherited her father's love of the big screen but not his exuberant gothic style of filmmaking. Instead, Severin makes documentaries, artful and passionate and even rather brave - for she is a realist in a fantastic alternate universe, in which Hollywood occupies the moon, Mars is rife with lawless saloons, and the solar system contains all manner of creatures, cults and colonies. For Severin's latest project she leads her crew to the watery planet of Venus to investigate the disappearance of a diving colony there. But something goes wrong during the course of their investigations; and her crew limp home without her. All that remains of Severin are fragments. Can these snippets of scenes and shots, voices and memories, pages and recordings be collected and pieced together to tell the story of her life - and shed light on the mystery of her vanishing? Clever, dreamy, strange and beautifully written - Radiance is a novel about how stories give form to worlds.
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781472115157
Number of pages: 432
Weight: 350 g
Dimensions: 197 x 126 x 28 mm
The long-awaited first science fiction novel - though it's really more of a cosmic fantasy - from Tiptree winner Valente is a masterpiece of storytelling, seductive in prose and ambitious in scope ... This will captivate readers with all the drama and wonder that Valente's strange and wonderful golden age Hollywood demands. - Publishers WeeklyValente's descriptions are lush and striking, her worlds reveling in the dreamiest of nods to classic science fiction, where alien planets are full of life and easily reachable.A heady, strange, and beautifully written novel about how stories give form to worlds. - KirkusAn intriguing examination of how we piece together our personal narratives - Washington PostRadiance is a sleek rocket ship of a novel, swaddled in Art Deco decadence and glossy with an unsettling alt-history patina. - New York Times
TBH I really struggled with the format of this, it was a story told in a book but it didn't feel like it was comfortable there.
A lot of that may have come from the fact that it has deep roots in "film"...
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Radiance is about as close to perfect as you can get in book form. Be warned: this book isn't for everyone. Ostensibly the story of the mysterious disappearance of Severin Unck, daughter of famous film director... More
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