Radiance
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
