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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Vanished Birds
by Simon Jimenez
The Spear Cuts Through Water knocked my socks off, so I figured I'd try Jimenez's other book. The Vanished Birds is a odd, digressive space opera focusing on longing, love, and loss. We begin with a boy on an agricultural world defined by the every 15 year cycle of the interstellar trade fleet. Kaeda grows up and falls in love with a space captain, who's lives intersect for one night every 15 years.
On the last round, when he's an old man, he hands off to the space captain a strange mute boy, who arrived naked in a fireball from the night sky. We follow Nia and the boy on their ramshackle little freighter, and take another lengthy digression 1000 years in the past, to a dying Earth where advanced technology can not keep ahead of ecological disaster, where a ugly little girl, Fumiko, falls in love, and abandons her lover to pursue a job for a powerful and possessive conglomerate. Fumuko designs massive space stations which will save the lives of one billion people.
Shame about everyone else.
And then back to the present, with Nia and the boy. They run into Fumiko, still alive via cold sleep and interstellar travel, which is FTL but due to time currents, a journey of subjective weeks means a gap of years at the destination. Fumiko is still a brilliant scientist, and she thinks that the boy is a jaunter, a rumored miracle who can teleport between planets, ending slow and messy space travel. Nia gets a new mission and a new crew to shepherd the boy around the frontier, outside of Alliance space, until his powers manifest or 15 years arrive.
And his powers do manifest, but what should be a moment of unified triumph and wonder for mankind instead turns into a horror of betrayals and monstrous exploitation, and a thrilling conclusion of revenge.
So what worked? As expected, the absolute mood of this book, the stylishness of the sentence to sentence writing, the adventures of the creaking ship, the very obvious losses and damages of the characters. The evil of the Alliance as an imperial power was revealed in layers of glorious villainy, the veins of fire inside the iron fist inside the velvet glove. The characters, their need for each other, and the distance between them, also came through. Plot, pacing, and internal coherency were tertiary concerns. The Vanished Birds is imaginative and well-crafted, but Spear is fucking perfect.
On the last round, when he's an old man, he hands off to the space captain a strange mute boy, who arrived naked in a fireball from the night sky. We follow Nia and the boy on their ramshackle little freighter, and take another lengthy digression 1000 years in the past, to a dying Earth where advanced technology can not keep ahead of ecological disaster, where a ugly little girl, Fumiko, falls in love, and abandons her lover to pursue a job for a powerful and possessive conglomerate. Fumuko designs massive space stations which will save the lives of one billion people.
Shame about everyone else.
And then back to the present, with Nia and the boy. They run into Fumiko, still alive via cold sleep and interstellar travel, which is FTL but due to time currents, a journey of subjective weeks means a gap of years at the destination. Fumiko is still a brilliant scientist, and she thinks that the boy is a jaunter, a rumored miracle who can teleport between planets, ending slow and messy space travel. Nia gets a new mission and a new crew to shepherd the boy around the frontier, outside of Alliance space, until his powers manifest or 15 years arrive.
And his powers do manifest, but what should be a moment of unified triumph and wonder for mankind instead turns into a horror of betrayals and monstrous exploitation, and a thrilling conclusion of revenge.
So what worked? As expected, the absolute mood of this book, the stylishness of the sentence to sentence writing, the adventures of the creaking ship, the very obvious losses and damages of the characters. The evil of the Alliance as an imperial power was revealed in layers of glorious villainy, the veins of fire inside the iron fist inside the velvet glove. The characters, their need for each other, and the distance between them, also came through. Plot, pacing, and internal coherency were tertiary concerns. The Vanished Birds is imaginative and well-crafted, but Spear is fucking perfect.