"Most stories begin as scraps, sewn into neat, seamless tales later on. Radiance is a story about story and storytelling, stitched together in a way that leaves the ensuing tale interestingly scarred. Reading through this interplanetary mystery epic feels like sitting up late into the night, sorting through the archives of an alternative history told through the reels, recordings, and journals of a tabloid-worshipped Hollywood director, his documentarian daughter, and those who played roles in the snipping and re-stitching of the legacy the world expected each of them to leave behind."
Publisher Tor Books
Publication Date 2015-10-20
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / Science Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Ashley T.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780765335296
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.
