From the Bookshelf of The Sword and Laser…

Radiance

Catherynne M. Valente

Start date: January 1, 2016

Finish date: January 31, 2016

Discussion: 2016 Reads

Why we're reading this: Because Tom said so!
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2016 Reads

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What Members Thought

Dec 27, 2015 Tom Merritt rated it really liked it

This science fiction book, which is not really a science fiction book, tells a story, which is not really a story that is part tone poem, part pulp novel, part experimental romance, and parts of many other things. In fact it's not really a book is it? Just pieces of one. And yet, I love it right in the face. ...more

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May 28, 2015 Jlawrence rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sword-and-laser

The most difficult to get into of the Valente I’ve read so far, but ultimately beautiful and rewarding.

When I heard Valente describe the setting in her video interview with Sword & Laser, I was instantly captivated. It’s set in an alternate early-and-mid-20th-century in which the fantasies of the early sf pulps turn out to be fact: every planet in our solar system has breathable atmosphere, is habitable, boasts its own flamboyant flora & fauna, and is in various states of colonization by humans The most difficult to get into of the Valente I’ve read so far, but ultimately beautiful and rewarding.

When I heard Valente describe the setting in her video interview with Sword & Laser, I was instantly captivated. It’s set in an alternate early-and-mid-20th-century in which the fantasies of the early sf pulps turn out to be fact: every planet in our solar system has breathable atmosphere, is habitable, boasts its own flamboyant flora & fauna, and is in various states of colonization by humans plying space in elegant bullet-shaped silver rockets fired from massive cannons. Amidst all this, Severin Unck, raised by a film director father in the alternate Hollywood that thrives on Earth’s moon, has become a famous film documentarian in her own right, (trying to capture reality in film vs. her father’s insistance on filmic fantasy) and has disappeared under mysterious circumstances on Venus.

In presenting who Severin was and why she disappeared, the book offers a mosaic of viewpoints, alternating in style (diary entries, movie scripts, incident investigation transcripts, film clips, fairy tales involving space whales...) and with chronological time shuffled (though individual recurring threads do progress chronologically as you read the novel). So from chapter-to-chapter you are shifting in time, space and narrative voice.

Valente’s Orphan's Tales also had a complex structure (there, of stories-nested-in-stories, often many levels deep), but each chapter there was also a tale of its own, regardless of its obvious or subtle connection to other tales, whereas the chapters in Radiance are truly fragments, some of which add up as puzzle pieces and some of which are contradictory (to illustrate the difficulty of trying to shape life into neat narratives).

There is a brilliant, in-world reason for Radiance’s structure, revealed at the end, but it can make the initial going rough. I can love being presented with puzzle pieces of narrative to snap together, but I feel that in the early portions of the book there are too many fragment-chapters that layer on meta-commentary about storytelling, where the chapters that deal with the investigation of Severin’s disappearance and moreover chapters that give us more of a reason to care about her could have been moved earlier in the sequence, to better hook the reader into this world. (In fact, the book’s structure and filmic themes almost cry out for readers to imagine their own ‘fan-edit’ re-ordering of the chapters.)

Despite those caveats, an amazing experience by the end, with much beautiful writing, haunting imagery, and a richly imagined world. I think I will especially love when I come to my eventual re-read of it, for I will just be savoring those aspects instead of trying to piece the fragments together. ...more

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