Radiance: A Novel

by Catherynne M. Valente

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765335302
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/18/2016
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	238,505
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE's first major novel, The Orphan's Tales, won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. Her next, Palimpsest, was nominated for the Hugo Award, and her recent YA phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a New York Times bestseller that earned starred reviews from all three major review outlets. Valente lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and a cat.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/17/2015
The long-awaited first science fiction novel—though it’s really more of a cosmic fantasy—from Tiptree winner Valente (whose last novel for adults was 2011’s Deathless) is a masterpiece of storytelling, seductive in prose and ambitious in scope. In an alternate 1944 where interplanetary travel is the norm, a film crew headed by Severin Unck journeys to Venus to investigate the Roanoke-like disappearance of the diving village Adonis. The voyage ends in disaster. Severin is the outspoken daughter of a famous Hollywood director, but she eschews her father’s fantasy tales, preferring true stories. When she doesn’t return from the ill-fated Venus shoot, speculation leads to rumor and conjecture, and the press and hoi polloi are only too happy to fan the flames of gossip. Severin’s tale is told largely through press snippets, film notes, audio transcripts, preproduction meetings, and interviews with the surviving crew. This celluloid fairy tale about one woman’s life beyond her father’s legacy and the all-seeing eye of the lens will captivate readers with all the drama and wonder that Valente’s strange and wonderful golden age Hollywood demands. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2015-05-06
Valente imagines an alternate solar system and sends her heroine, a filmmaker, to Venus, where she disappears. Severin Unck is a headstrong and passionate young woman, a director of documentaries whose hints of confession are as artful and scripted as only someone who grew up with the movies can manage. The daughter of a famous director in the old Hollywood mold, Severin lives in a universe where the movie industry occupies the moon but films remain silent and where various planets are claimed by the Earth's nations but persist in being flamboyantly alien. When Severin travels to Venus to make a film about a colony that vanished, leaving only unsettling rumors behind, it becomes her last creation—she never returns. The story of her disappearance emerges in a variety of forms and voices—gossip columns, fragments of screenplays, diary entries, advertisements, and, in a dizzying layering of fictions, a movie made by her father that mutates from noir to gothic to fairy tale. The narrative stretches back to her childhood and forward to the investigation following her crew's return, veering from tense adventure to sly probing of how we choose to make the stories of our lives. An unnamed narrator claims it's a story of seeing and being seen. "We shall endeavor to make ourselves equally naked, equally bare, equally vulnerable to iris and pupil, whose bites are ever so much fiercer than teeth." Valente's (The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, 2015, etc.) 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.

Kirkus Reviews