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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.
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.
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Reviews
Valente has crafted beautiful imagery and packed every page with breathtaking invention
An intriguing examination of how we piece together our personal narratives
Radiance is a lush, pulpy parable about storytelling and self-perception, part old-fashioned thriller, part postmodern metafiction, the narrative intercut with film scripts and gossip columns to create a layered account of a glorious past that never was.
Radiance is a sleek rocket ship of a novel, swaddled in Art Deco decadence and glossy with an unsettling alt-history patina.
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.
Heady, dreamy, beautifully written, art-deco, literary sci-fi
Valente writes beautifully baroque prose
One of the most original books of the year so far, this tale of the romance of silent film movie-making and early Hollywood soons veers into the most unpredictable of directions and takes the reader to new worlds and horizons that are truly staggering in their speculative sense of wonder ... Bizarre, exhilarating and a must read for anyone with a thirst for the uncommon.
Valente'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.