Radiance

by Catherynne M. Valente

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 1946 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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Alternate History, Steampunk, Mystery, Science Fiction Fantasy

432 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 2015

About the author

Catherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and camphor wilds of Japan.

She currently lives in Maine with her partner, two dogs, and three cats, having drifted back to America and the mythic frontier of the Midwest.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read 5/24/20:

After re-reading my gushing review from years ago and having just re-read the fantastic book, I wonder if there's anything I can add to it?

Ah, how about this: Getting a nice hardbound version and sipping the tale like a great wine is recommended.

Re-reads are not only welcome -- but delightful.

And damn... the ending is both nearly incomprehensible and immensely satisfying. Active readers will have a huge, huge kick. :)


Original review:

This was A-Fucking-Mazing.

This is what all SF aspires to be when it grows up and speaks like David Foster Wallace channeling Roger Zelazny.

I want to have this book's babies.

Do I like this? Oh my lord... do I like this??? Okay. Word of warning: don't bother reading this unless you KNOW your mythology, and I'm not just talking about the greeks. There's a boatload of Sumerian in here, as well. Each and every city is appropriate. Each and every name is square on the mark. This book is brilliant. BRILLIANT. It shines with Radiance.

Okay. Now down to the nitty-gritty. We slide easily between motion picture scripting and stream of consciousness, with a few actual epistles thrown in. It's accomplished and speaks of a grand familiarity with traditional mainstream fiction, even going so far as to rise as high as any of the past masters. Don't be fooled into thinking that because this is SF that it is anything less than masterful. I'm going to have to read this one several more times to pick up everything, but even on my first quick read, I picked up more than enough to shiver with delight and drool from both sides of my mouth because I am, essentially, a level-headed person.

One thing that is common upon practically every level of this read, and the title gives it away. Radiance. It's all about bringing forth the best version through the magic of light.

You can read this story from the surface, getting into the magical mystery of Severin and her disappearance, or the magic of moviemaking, but all of that's just the easy route. Another route is to read between the lines, to see that every person and every place is a pure metaphor that works, time and time again, to bolster the initial and ongoing themes of bringing meaning out of death, magic out of life, and raising the standard of understanding everything else with eyes as sharp as the sun. All the artists in this book are on a quest to bring their Art to the next level, and none of them are failures. They are the embodiment of beauty-crafting, myth-building, and obsession. Percival and Severin is a perfect example.

An entirely different level of this same theme caught my attention right off the bat and turned me into a giddy mess. Ms. Valente turned our solar-system into a heaven and a haven, the best of all possible worlds, a place where everyone and everything could survive, custom-made to support life and happiness. I think of all the pulp SF out there, not forgetting Burroughs or Bradbury, that had lush life on Venus and Mars. Of course, she took it much farther. Mercury had it's own unique species, as did Jupiter and Saturn, their moons, and all the way to Pluto and Charon, which had a huge vegetable stalk connecting the two moonlets together in an endless dance, with strange cows and lotus flowers ready to provide life and sustenance for humans when they arrived. It was gorgeous. It was a dream come true, and artistic rendering that turned our hellish system into a horn of plenty, and yes, everywhere was giving us air to breathe. This, too, was the artist giving us a brilliant conception of the world through the Fae Light of movie magic, and I admit that I fell into its spell as deeply and completely as any of the very best books I've ever read. It was told so well that I drowned in not giving a fuck about having realistic science. This was all about dreams and magic, as only our deepest joys of a mythical Hollywood could conceive.

Is this enough to propel you to a wonderful reading experience? I hope so. But wait... I haven't even mentioned the Callowhales.

And I won't. They're very important, and increasingly so.

This is one of the best books I've ever read. Maybe it just speaks to me, and me alone, because I love complicated flights of immense imagination, detailed with such density and beauty that I was forced to slow the hell down and savor each word, each turn of phrase, each reference. Was I doubly amazed by the structure of the read when scenes replayed themselves as to throw all of my ideas about what I was reading into an entirely new light? Hells yes. The writing was masterful. I know I said that before. I'm saying it again because I have to sit back down with this book, SOON, and study it. I WANT to study it. It is so damn rich as to turn practically everything else I read into shallow piles of doo.

:)

I can't believe this is just the first novel I've read of hers. I've been hearing about her works for years, and yet I just never got around to reading any of them. I wanted to. I really did, but something always got in the way. I seem to be saying that a lot about a handful of authors, recently. Well I'm FIXING THAT. I'm going to be reading the rest of her works very soon. No one that can write like this should ever be dismissed or ignored. Brilliance is Brilliance.

[Erik · Rating 1 out of 5]

Because I am unable to resist the seductions of irony, here is a quote from Robert Downey Jr.:

This is probably going to get quoted in every publication just because I said it. And I’m not even saying anything. I’m not talking about my films, I’m not talking about my life, and I’m not talking about the world. And yet, the media will print it simply because I said it. And at this moment in time, I bet there is an artist around the corner of this hotel, on the street, with a mind far beyond ours, but we will never listen to him simply because he has not appeared in a movie.

He goes on to say, “And that is what is fucked up about our culture,” but that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

Instead, I’d like to appreciate for a moment the popularity of celebrities and the compelling nature of fiction in general. We all have known the experience of watching a film and finding ourselves on the edge of our seats, empathizing with the characters. This, even though we know that they are just actors, in NO DANGER whatsoever, and that, even if “based on a true story,” what’s actually happening on the screen is an artificial construct, no more real than a golem’s dream. Yet there we are, caring. Somehow these characters in their imaginary worlds approximate truth in a way that actual reality, confusing and indeterminate as it is, cannot.

Many people, particularly a certain stripe of intellectual, would call us fools and escapists, mere addicts of the phantasmagorical. I know a fellow who foreswore all fiction and instead dedicated himself exclusively to documentary film and non-fiction books (and also joined a nudist colony). David Foster Wallace in his essay E Unibus Pluram suggested our television obsession causes a chain reaction of disassociation in which American fiction writers get their dosage of reality from fiction – which is itself written by personages who have based their reality on consumed fiction – thereby creating a recursive spiral down the rabbit hole, until what we think is reality is not real but an infinitely regressed, telephone-game garbled version of it.

Even if I were to agree in principle, I would not agree in sentiment. I think humanity’s capacity for empathy is nothing short of amazing.

I'd say that when we engage in narrative, we are exercising our empathy muscles. All forms of narrative do this, but the intimate nature of written literature does it best. A good book – with complex, diverse characters and morally gray situations – is the empathy version of a Crossfit workout. As such, I’d claim that readers are, if not the best people in the world, at least the most empathetic. I believe our pathetic little meatsack hearts, brimming with narrative and character, carry on the great work of humanity in a way that the mighty wielders of the sword and the hammer and the abacus do not. I say that the greatest and most beautiful machine or theory, wielded without empathy, is not only inhuman, but antihuman.

Alas, Radiance demands little exercise of our empathy muscles (or perhaps too much). It’s not that it doesn’t contain complex characters, morally gray situations, or a great imagination, but that they are not presented in an engaging manner. Instead the author utilizes language, structure, genre, and form as ends unto themselves, rather than as means to an end (that end typically being the exploration of humanity). Put simply, the author Catherynne Valente wanted to eat her cake and have it too. To quote from an interview she had with John Scalzi:

I’m not going to lie. This book is crazypants. I threw everything I had into it. Heart and soul and probably some cartilage and eyeball fluid, too. I wanted to write a melodrama about a wild, living and breathing and squabbling Solar System. I wanted to write a horror-romance about huge, elemental aliens. I wanted to write a non-linear postmodern SF novel that was also a page-turning thriller because I secretly always wanted to write a hardboiled noir murder mystery. I wanted to write a badass adventure about film patents. I wanted to write a book about movies. About seeing and being seen. About what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side. About who has the right to speak, and who has to buy it. About the meaning of science fiction in a science fictional universe. And through it all I wanted to write about a lost girl who didn’t come home. It all hangs together, I promise!

Alas, Catherynne Valente, you’ve made a promise you couldn’t keep. Not for this reader at least. It doesn’t hang together. It’s too much in too little space. Worse, you’ve committed the one sin no author – whether her book is a non-linear postmodern narrative or not – can commit: you didn’t give us a reason to care.

Now those who do like this book might argue that I’m committing the affective fallacy. That I’m critiqueing a piece of literature based on how it makes us FEEL (as opposed to what it makes us think). They would trumpet the book’s non-linear narrative and metafictional elements as an explicit choice that may make the book more difficult to read but that is NECESSARY to the story’s ultimate purpose: To explore the subjective nature of reality, and of film’s intersections with it, and the methods and consequences of how and where we choose to focus the spotlights of our eyeballs, ears, and minds.

I would counter that not all non-linear narratives are created equal. Even if the mere EXISTENCE of a non-linear narrative OUGHT to tell us the author is trying to make some metafictional comment about genre or narrative, that doesn’t mean she actually accomplished her aims. I’d go further still: even the ACCOMPLISHMENT of these aims wouldn’t necessarily make the book worth reading. Instead, each reader must ultimately ask him or herself, is the metafictional exploration of genre worth reading if the author has failed to provide a compelling underpinning of humanity?

My complete lack of engagement with this novel would answer a resounding NO.

But do not mistake this as MERELY an opposition to postmodern fiction. True enough I consider postmodern lit a form of intellectual masturbation, but a 1-star rating from me is an even greater condemnation. I think Radiance is a particularly bad example of post-modern lit.

By way of contrast, I’d bring up Italo Calvino’s post-modern book If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler. That book is in many ways as difficult and experimental as Radiance. But I love it. I love it because underpinning its non-linear structure is a humor and keen sense of the absurd that give readers a reason to care.

More technically, Calvino’s novel plays with structure by way of concatenation. By this, I mean it tells micro-stories compelling in their own right but then ends them at the height of climax, a level of tease to make any Arabian concubine proud. A Winter’s Night’s meta-story is then about the reader (often pronounized as ‘you’) in his search to find the rest of the story and therefore closure. Story structure thus mirrors story theme: how readers engage with narrative as a whole and how our expectations for a standard narrative structure (rising action -> climax -> falling action -> denouement) have become inculcated in us and in fact now inform our fundamental conceptualizations of things like romantic relationships, life and death, and even our debates on intelligent design versus the theory of evolution. Deep deep stuff.

Catherynne Valente, as the above quote reveals, thinks she’s also writing about deep deep stuff. But the difference is that Radiance's form and content have a fractious, dissonant (and unengaging) relationship. In a different interview with Clarkesworld Magazine, she writes:

I had to give myself permission to do certain things, use certain tricks—like including scripts, audio, shifting POV, and the other ephemera and metafictional elements you mention. It’s pretty much a postmodern free-for-all. At first I kept thinking: I can’t just describe what’s onscreen in a movie inside the book. That just makes it look like I’d rather be making a movie. I had to get to a point where I could say: I actually can do that because it’s my book and that’s the right way to do it.

That phrase – “a postmodern free-for-all” – says it all. The book is a mish-mash of ideas and forms, its structure a shotgun spread rather than a sniper’s intimate voyeurism. The quote as a whole is an admission of self-indulgence. She includes scripts, audio, shifting POV, and other ephemera and metafictional elements not because doing so highlights explorations on “seeing and being seen; on what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side; on who has the right to speak, and who has to buy it; and on the meaning of science fiction in a science fictional universe” – but because she bloody well wanted to, propagating the mistaken post-modern confusion that MERE EXPLORATION of structure is, BY ITSELF, evidence of great and skillful artifice, if not authorial courage, and therefore worthy of being read.

Well I disagree. I would quote Picasso when he wrote, “In my opinion to search means nothing… To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.”

As I read through Radiance’s self-indulgent epilogue (which amounts, quite clearly, to the author justifying her decision to use a shotgun structure because “humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next” – which, by the by, is a standard postmodern claim that is completely false. Au contraire, it is the tragedy of humanity that we have no choice but to creep in a chronologically linear fashion from scene to scene and tomorrow to tomorrow until the last syllable of our borrowed time); its boring essays from fictional film critics; its lists of ship’s manifest (and here I thought I left that self-important scheiss behind back on Walden Pond); and its long rants mistaking high-octane, purple prose like, “the Earth fucked the sky and made a hundred children” for genuine exploration of humanity – as I went through all this, I was never once engaged mano y mano. This was no story but a magic show by a patchwork golem, a dazzling array of images and words that held all the cohesive meaning of a fireworks display. I was never shown why any of these characters might have a superior grasp than I do on, e.g., who has a right to speak, or what it means to be seen, or what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side. Worse, I was never shown why I should CARE what any of these characters think.

In short, I would argue Radiance failed to ever find, or demonstrate, humanity in necessary quantities to overcome the artificiality of its narrative and structure. Its demands on my empathy muscles came far too late, far after it had lost me.

Earlier, I brought up Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler as a successful example of postmodern literature. It is therefore with great irony (and thus also circularity) that I believe the concluding paragraph from NY Times’ 1981 review of the book nails exactly how I feel about Radiance:

And then the book, for all its formidable wit and skill, is a confession of failure, and I think we shall get it wrong if we insist on converting all its apparent misses into clever hits. The stalled writer, the one who is in love with beginnings, says, "I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object." This is a desire, not a program. An expectation permanently unfocused will die, and an expectation that can't be focused is simply a disappointment. … As a book about broken narrative promises this work is impeccable. But its very success in this vein leads us to the sadness of its central subject, the absence of the artist, Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, who could brilliantly keep the promises he made.

[Dan Schwent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Documentary filmmaker Severin Unck never returned from her last project on Venus. Thus begins the meta-fictional odyssey into Severin Unck's life and fate.

Radiance is the story of Severin Unck's life (and death?), told by Severin and the people who knew her in the form of articles, journal entries, scripts, and films, most notably Severin's own. I was apprehensive at first, since this sounds like a first class ticket to fancy-pants town, like a lot of books that use meta-fictional devices. However, Catherynne Valente can get into my fancy pants any day.

Told in a non-linear fashion, Radiance tells the story of Severin Unck through interviews and films of the people who knew her, from her father, Percival Unck and his seven ex-wives, to Erasmo St. John, her last lover, to Anchises St. John, the little boy who was the only survivor of the Adonis colony on Venus. Unlike a lot of literature that uses meta-fiction to tell the tale, the techniques are actually relevant to the story.

The setting is an enjoyable one, one where space travel was mastered decades earlier and every planet and moon in the solar system is habitable. Colonization is depended on monstrous Venusian beasts called callowwhales. Because of the tyranny of the Edisons, everyone is still making silent movies, making for a very unique setting indeed.

There's not a whole lot more I want to say about the plot. Catherynne Valente shows her writing chops in this outing, going from sf to screenplay to soap opera to noir, and all points beyond, without missing a beat. I'd read a library of Madame Mortimer mysteries.

4.5 out of 5 stars. This one is not to be missed.

[KL (Cat)]

DECOPUNK PULP SF ALT-HISTORY SPACE OPERA MYSTERY.

that... that is like my aesthetic explained in 7 words. [dies]

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Updated review after a second reading in November 2018.

--

"I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system."

Ms. Valente wrote the kind of book I wish I could write, and for that I am both in awe of her, and kinda pissed off. Seriously, the woman took some of my all-time favorite things, chucked them in a blender and then wrote this book.

A documentary film maker goes missing while she is shooting her final project, about a mysteriously deserted colonial settlement on Venus. Her story is pieced together through movies, depositions, hard-boiled detective style remembrances and her own “video diary” entries. It sounds choppy and yes, you must pay attention to the dates of the various entries to not get confused, but Catherynne Valente knows just how to weave all these elements together to form a beautiful, completely original story.

The world Valente crafted for “Radiance” is an alternate Earth where the Golden Age of Hollywood has remained one of silent black and white movies because of patent wars, where humanity has explored the solar system and colonized all its planets, where the “milk” of mysterious Venusian creatures known as callow whales is what enables humans to experience space travel safely, and where making documentary movies is considered “genre” because everyone is so obsessed with lurid fantasy that it's now the mainstream. Of course, that can be too rich for some readers’ blood, and I can’t really blame them. But I am an absolute glutton for this deco-punk phantasmagoria.

I enjoyed this novel immensely, and while it is not perfect, it has a fairy tale/sci-fi/what-the-hell-is-going-on vibe to it that just blew me away. I kept thinking of the Georges Meliès movies, the exaggerated movements and expressions, the surreal plot lines and beautiful cardboard sets… I loved the non-linear, patchwork flow of the book and the alternate history where inter-planetary travel is just as H.G. Wells might have imagined it.

The narrative is a postmodern mosaic (I seem to be reading a lot of those lately…) and its a colorful, glittery literary puzzle, and it is also a love letter to silent films, to a certain dramatic aesthetic that went out of fashion but for which Valente clearly still pines.

It is dizzying, occasionally frustrating; but I also found it dazzling and exuberant. This is not really an escapist read, it’s a book that you need to chew on a bit. I’ve come to find that those are the books I usually end up enjoying the most, the challenging ones, the ones that require patience and brains.

I enjoyed (and probably understood) this novel even more the second time around! If you are a fan of Valente, or are looking for a book that’s unlike anything you’ve read before, this might just be what you are looking for!

[Tom Merritt · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jessica ❁ ➳ Silverbow ➳ ❁]

Catherynne M. Valente is at the top of my list of authors whose talent makes me positively green with envy.

Her command of the English language is . . . humbling. Her words are not only strangely beautiful, easily understood despite the complete lack of anything familiar, but they are also riddled with truths . . . sometimes painful truths . . . that are wondrously expressed:

Come in from that assault on all senses, that pummelling of rod and cone and drum and cilia.
Come in from the great spotlight of the sun, sweeping across the white sands, making everyone, and therefore no one, a star.

I just finished reading the preview chapters of RADIANCE, and my impression based on the excerpt is that it is a kind of sci-fi/noir/satire mashup.

A starlit is dead. Maybe. Probably. At least it's possible that she's dead:

Her name is Severin Unck. She is ten years old. She is talking to her father, Percy.
She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.

What follows is gossip rag speculation, in depth dissections of her life as captured on film, and also observations on the practices of stock celebrities that make our culture pop . . .

And unlike the finely coiffed and trained Hollywood-types, it isn't pretty.

Suffice it to say, I am well and truly hooked and will be counting down the days to RADIANCE's release: October 20, 2015.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watch a mini-review in my August 2017 wrap up!

Now THIS is a book that will stay with me...

Obviously, Valente's writing deserves all kinds of praise. It's lush. You just swim though her prose. I can understand her use of language being a bit too much for some people, but I ate it up like a rich meal paired with the perfect wine, topped off with a melt-in-your mouth dessert that leaves you uncomfortably full in the very best way.

This truly does not feel like other novels. It's epistolary, and that's what elevates this book so much. Because of the format, you're not just watching the characters try to solve a mystery. You YOURSELF are piecing together this book, trying to solve for what exactly the mystery IS. Because of the format, you don't meet all the players and certain documents may seem out of place or utterly confusing. What is going on? You're forced to go on a similar journey as the characters. They are trying to figure out this mystery while you are trying to figure out the mystery of this book. It's meta, and it's amazing.

I do think a passing understanding of film theory makes this book even better. Valente clearly knows her stuff when it comes to film (her father's first love was film-making), and it shows. Knowing a bit about gaze, perspective, and the role of the audience in film is integral to picking up some of this book's moments of sheer brilliance. The best films play with their audiences. By this, I don't mean they play tricks on their audiences (though that's fun, too!), but rather that great films are aware that they are being watched--voyeurs in plush seats in a darkened room. This book manages to do the same. The reader is the voyeur, but much like the characters in this book, readers are forced to "step into the light." The format of the book requires a kind of active reading. Because you have to pieces this book together, Valente doesn't allow her readers to be passive voyeurs peering into this world, into this story. It's sheer brilliance.

This book is definitely not for everyone. The dialogue is nowhere near the way people speak in real life. Place is given just as much page time as character and plot. The narrative structure is (intentionally!) fairly nonsensical. And I loved every minute of it.

[Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The strangest book I've ever read.

This book features in my Best Sci-fi & Fantasy Books video on BookTube at Hello, Bookworm. 🖤



Radiance is a decopunk pulp sci-fi alternate history space opera mystery about a woman who travels through space investigating cults on Neptune or lawless saloons on Mars, and she also makes documentary films.

Her latest film project turns out to be her last. She travels to Venus (where island-sized alien creatures roam the waters) to investigate the disappearance of a diving colony, but her crew returns without her.

The book is the story of what happened to her. And it’s told through a series of transcribed recordings, journal entries, lists, gossip magazine articles, and more.

It’s a story of love and loss that spans the solar system and takes some shocking dark turns. Highly recommend this if book you’re in the mood for a challenging, strange read.

[Ashley Marie]

DNF @ 23%

Gahhhh I just can't. Again with the oodles of description and minimal action. The writing itself is gorgeous but when I get so wrapped up in the words that I get lost and don't know how to find my way back to what's going on (assuming something IS actually going on) then it's a no go, unfortunately.

[Aurora · Rating 5 out of 5]

The prologue is the mother of the tale and the governess of the audience. She knows you have to bring them in slow, teach them how to behave.

Catherynne M Valente doesn't have a silver tongue; she has a 24 karat gold tongue studded with stars and diamonds of every color. Her vocabulary is a menagerie of tigers and dragons; white wolves and black unicorns.

Radiance is a alt-history space opera noir set in a solar-system where every planet has been colonized by mankind. The moon is home to a silent-film industry. Uranus has cities of towers grown from pink and green and yellow anemones. Pluto is covered in fields of infanta flowers and connected to it's moon by a bridge of blooms. The universe Valente creates is so wildly imaginative and vividly brought to life - I wouldn't have minded one bit if the whole novel was just a guided tour of the cosmos, describing each planet in rich, glorious detail.

But of course, it's much more than that.

Severin Unck is a documentary filmmaker and the daughter of a famous director. She and her crew travel to Venus, a planet largely covered in water and home to the callowhales, a mysterious lifeform who's milk is the very thing making it possible from humans to live on different planets. They're there to make a movie about a village that disappeared over night, leaving no one behind, but one mysterious boy. Once they get there - strange things start happening and then, Severin disappears.

Radiance is the story of her disappearance, or rather: it is the story of the story of her disappearance, as told by the ones who got left behind and through a variety of mediums; journal entries, gossip columns, film scripts, transcripts. Some of it remembered, some of it imagined. It's a riddle of a book; a puzzle where the pieces make something greater than a whole. I loved watching it all unfold, from those tantalizing first lines all the way to the enigmatic end.

And when the ships made landfall, the stories, having conserved their energy, burst free and ran wild, changing into local clothes and dancing up on stages and wearing flowers in their hair. Stories are like that. They love havoc, especially their own.

Radiance-playlist:
Frank Sinatra - Fly Me to the Moon
Father John Misty - Only Son Of The Ladies Man
Chopin - Nocturne op.9 No.2
John Grant - Marz
Highasakite - Lover, Where Do You Live?
El Vy - Return to the Moon (Political Song for Didi Bloome to Sing, with Crescendo)
David Bowie - Life On Mars?

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars - I think I'm going to be the odd one out on this one but it just didn't work for me. It had moments of brilliance but it just didn't come together as a cohesive whole. I love weird books and books that don't follow linear narratives and that use different ways of telling the story. This has all of that so I should have loved it but unfortunately I didn't and by the end I just didn't care.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I full on genuflect to the brilliance, imagination and gorgeous mind behind this book. It's recognizably the woman who wrote Palimpsest, but even more tender, even more full of such stuff as dreams are made on. I'll never forget this patchwork of glorious pieces.

I hope to write more soon.

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Executive Summary: This book just wasn't for me, but then I don't like literary fiction. The parts I enjoyed were just too infrequent.

Full Review
This book wasn't on my radar at all. Ms. Valente was on the Sword & Laser podcast late last year, but I apparently forgot all about it. That should have been my first warning.

I'm a big fan of movies. I'm a pretty big fan of science-fiction. This should have been a happy marriage for me, but it wasn't. I've seen hundreds of films. I've read hundreds of books. I do both for fun. I don't enjoy to study either. I don't find having to work for what the story is about. This book was a lot of work. In the end it wasn't worth it for me. I'm still not sure what exactly I read.

This whole book seemed more like an exercise in clever writing than it was about telling a story. Maybe I'm just not smart enough for this book. I suspect this is more a case of not my kind of smarts. I imagine many people would feel just as uncomfortable reading books on computers as I did during parts of this. I don't like books that make me feel dumb.

I think I'd have been less frustrated with this book if I simply didn't like it. The underlying mystery of Severin and the world building were intriguing. I particularly enjoyed the chapters with Erasmo and Cynthia and Mary Pellam's diary entries. Unfortunately that was it. If the whole book had been written like those chapters, I'd have been a lot happier.

I found the chapters for Percival's final movie extremely confusing and often nonsensical. Most of the other chapters were unmemorable or equally confusing. It just feels like I was always missing something. I'd reread passages and whole pages and came away just as confused.

The book seemed to have 2 endings. Much like the book, I found the first one confusing and frustrating. However I was surprised to find I liked the second. It kind of sums things up nicely for me. Confused and frustrated most of the time, with some parts I was surprised to like. Maybe you'll have a better experience with it than I did.

[gio · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

A wonderful present from Lys, I literally squealed when I saw it. :*

It's close to 5 but I'm not sure how to rate it yet. Deathless is still my favourite of Valente's books and this one maybe didn't "flow" like I wanted it to. However I can't do anything but be amazed at her writing style and ideas and, most of all, knowledge of mythology. Radiance is extremely complex and full of references to mythology...I probably could re-read it all over again and find completely new elements.

The blurb describes Radiance as a "decopunk pulp SF alt-history space-opera mistery set in a Hollywood -- and solar system -- very different from our own.". Sounds complex? You haven't seen anything. After reading (and loving) Deathless I actually understood that Valente's books have layers. Everything, every little detail, is important and has a meaning of its own and it's almost like the author is giving you tiny pieces of the puzzle as the story progresses: it's up to you to put them in the right place. The trick though is that even when that puzzle is complete you still don't know everything: and again it's up to you to find what it might represent once it's complete. Yes, there is an "obvious" message, but there are so many other different meanings that I dare you to tell me you've understood all about the book. The same goes for Radiance, really. I could tell you that Radiance is a book about storytelling and I could say that it is about life and death and everything in between and I would not be telling a lie.

This author is one of the most talented voices of fantasy. She has it all: lavish writing style and gorgeous ideas.

Favourite quotes:

“But that wouldn't be honest. That wouldn't be real. That would give you the idea that a life is a simple thing to tell, that it's obvious where to start--BIRTH--and even more obvious where to stop--DEATH. Fade from black to black.
I won't have it. I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end when they should, and that 'should' come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. Why, isn't living easy? Isn't it grand? As easy as reading aloud.
No.
If I slice it all up and stitch it back together, you might not understand what I've been trying to say all my life: that any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. I can't. I can't tell you that lie...
If I fixed it so time goes the way you expect, you might come away thinking I know what the hell I'm doing.”

"But that's not how it is in real life, Rinny. Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realize that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun."

This.

Full review to come

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book about a movie producer and his daughter's disappearance/death that I have read. Only this book isn't written as a typical thriller-that-could-be-real-life, this is (amongst many other things) space opera!

In this alternate solar system, life is everyhwere. There are even whales on Venus (and boy, did I love those!). Due to Edison's family being pricks (hoarding patents), there are only silent movies but space travel is a normal occurrence for humanity.
Severin Unck's father makes movies, Gothic romances to be precise. The girl grows up with various "muses" standing in for the role of mother. The girl adores her father and is fascinated by filmmaking. However, the older she gets, the more pronounced her different character becomes until she chooses to make documentaries instead of movies of fiction.
One day, her work leads her to Venus, where she wants to make a documentary about a colony that has disappeared. She doesn't return. There are survivors of her crew and even one of the colony, but Severin is never seen again (no, that is not a spoiler).

Right in the beginning, we are told that there have been a number of mysterious incidents on Venus and other planets where human settlements were destroyed/vanished. We also know from the start that Severin disappears. We just don't know how and why and that sets the stage for one hell of a story.
A story not only about this weird alternate solar system, but about even weirder and yet magnificent alien lifeforms, about a tragic family history.

There are a lot of layers to this story. Mostly, the key issue of this book is endings. A loved one going missing, you not knowing if they are really dead and what happened, regrets that might plague you, a person's desire for closure.
And let me tell you: the ending is gonna blow your mind and rock your world!

Valente always has a magical writing style that beguiles the readers, but here it brings to life a mesmerizing version of an interplanetary Hollywood complete with gorgeous rockets that results in a weird lack of realists. Instead, there are dreamers abound. Which makes Severin and how she sees the world so alien yet fantastic. It also makes this book a nice contrast to our real world where actual dreamers often are in short supply.

As all of Valente's books, this is a work of art. The images her writing invokes are detailed and whimsical, not really quantifyable (there are steampunk elements but there is also scifi and mystery and fantasy and crime noir and so much more). Moreover, the author manages to seemlessly weave in her almost endless knowledge of so much mythology. It's obscure so as not to confuse readers who don't know anything about it, but it's also present enough to delight those of us who do. The way she managed that feat almost moved me to tears.

Another book of this author's was about music in space and was shrill and squeaky and highly humorous. This one is about motion pictures and much more serious but also more beautiful in a way (I usually don't describe humorous pieces as artful/beautiful but serious pieces can be and this one is).

Whenever I read a Valente novel, no matter how wonderful it might be, I come to the conclusion that the very first of hers I read is still the best (the Fairyland series). In this case, I've come to the realization that this is like one of those books, only in space ... and some other places.

By the way, the audio version of this is narrated by Heath Miller, Valente's life partner, and he did a fantastic job.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outer space is the ultimate gothic mansion. What better place to search for things that go bump in the night?



Radiance unfolds in a bygone era that never quite existed. The golden age of silent film... on the moon. Diving bells for the seas of Venus. The Ottoman empire stretching to Jupiter. These are the familiar bare bones of our solar system, clothed in the feathers and flesh of extraterrestrial fauna, and wearing a dandy top hat.

It's an image partly reminiscent of a lot of classic sci-fi (for me, the ocean-filled Venus of The Space Trilogy came to mind), complete with mysterious, giant, life-giving creatures (like sandworms or mers, but with a twist). In this solar system full of beauty and adventure, we find pioneers seeking a new life, corporations seeking profit, and artists seeking inspiration. A conspicuously absent artist is the focus of this story: the documentarian Severin Unck. In her last project, she sought to investigate the abrupt disappearance of a town on Venus, which left behind nothing except a lone boy walking in circles. But before filming could be completed, Severin herself disappeared. All we have left are her surviving films, home movies from her childhood, and the complicated web of people who crossed paths with her and may or may not be willing to tell us what they know. And that's what this novel is made of.

It's a mystery.... and yet it's not. It reminded me of Interstellar, in that there's a lot of intrigue built up, but there's really only one solution that's consistent with the spirit and logic of the story, and you can figure out the general idea very early on. It's a testament to the novel's multifaceted gloriousness that this element of predictability didn't detract from my enjoyment at all.

I feel like I should say something about "world building", but it feels wrong to use the present tense: here's a world that's already been built, and we pop in to a show already in progress. It's like when you're minding your own business and suddenly hear people in the middle of a delicious conversation, and you're can't help being caught up in the struggle of understanding what they're on about.

And really, that might be a crux of the book: when we tell a story, through film or anecdotes or advertisement, what are we on about? Is the truth being uncovered or hidden, or is it all just beside the point?

We care about your family. No animals were harmed. The possibilities are endless. Got milk?

Severin, as someone who is determined to learn the facts about a universe that is (to us) fantastical, is a perfect subject through which to investigate the gap between reality and stories. She actively rejects the gothic films made by her father, with all their intrigue and supernatural phenomena. And yet, her own life story starts to resemble just such a tale - at least, the version of her life story that we're being told.

It's only that the answers to most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than - well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.

It's all down to girls, one way or another.

[Helene Jeppesen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was one of a kind! I can honestly say that I've never read a novel like "Radiance" before, and I love it when I encounter those kinds of reading surprises.
"Radiance" takes place on different planets, and it follows different plots and destinies in a non-linear way. It sounds confusing, and it is! But it's amazing how Catherynne M. Valente is still able to make sense of everything and maintain a common thread throughout.
It's hard to describe what this book is about, but basically we follow a young girl and her father who both share a fascination for films and film making. As I said, the novel takes place on different planets, and thankfully the book comes with an overview of each planet's sign so that you know where there chapters are set.
I have a lot of fascination for this novel, and I'm thrilled that my initial scepticism was brought to shame. I think that unique books like this should be celebrated and recognized, and that's why I highly recommend that you endeavour to go on this quirky, however amazing reading journey :)

[Donna Craig · Rating 1 out of 5]

When my husband and I were in college, we had a friend who was a performance artist. Since Jer did some modeling for him, we were invited to lots of art events. We have fond memories of Gavin’s laughing and teaching us how to act like pretentious art critics, talking about man’s inhumanity toward man and such things. Good times. 😊

This book is an attempt at being intellectual and artistic. I guess. Post-modern literature. Ok. Please just tell a good story with compelling characters! The author’s chosen voices are so pretentious and so off-putting. The plot sounded interesting in the blurb, but I couldn’t find it in the hour and a half that I spent listening to the audio (at 135% speed). I’ll also add that the narrator’s accent and delivery were completely repellent.

I was reminded by this book that life is short and I am likely more than halfway through mine. DNF.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to this, until I tried it. I really didn’t get far — tried the start, then skipped around, looking for something to like. Beyond the concept, and chapter names, well, nothing appealed. Seemed a muddled mess to me.

Well, YMMV. But if you like a traditional, coherent SF/F storyline, transparent prose and somewhat believable characters, you're likely to be disappointed. 1.5 stars, courtesy roundup.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a real mess in every sense. I think i really enjoy books which encompass several different genres and this one has great fun moving through them. Its a really interesting (and confusing) world of rocketships and silent movies.
Your inner astronomer will have issues though. I was fine with the cannon rockets, despite several unanswered technical questions. I was fine with people living on other planets in the solar system and those planets having life. But then i realised people where living ON Jupiter and Uranus, so these arn't gas-giants in this universe? that took some serious adjustment by my brain :lol .

There are a lot of 'problems', but i still upped it to 5-stars because there's just so much here. I really like a nicely written (plotting aside) book which feels dense with ideas.

The author does make a lot of decisions you might disagree with plot-wise. A horror writer could have done a lot more with The Expedition, but it's sort of brushed aside.
Severin, ostensibly the focus of the book gets rather lost in the shuffle and by the end feels little more than a shadow on a screen which maybe considered appropriate or not.
The only true problem for me writing wise was that the authors pastiches/homages were sometimes far too over the top and funny, coming closer to parody than seemed appropriate.

Also, what is Callowmilk used for? This substance is a central bit of world-building and yet i have no idea what it does. At first i assumed it stopped bone degradation during zero-g, but there are no scenes of zero-g during any of the space flights. then i thought it might be space radiation related but don't recall any specifics saying this.

Look its got rockets & silent movies it aims at high literature and moves through a half-dozen different genres, if that doesn't sound like a good time i don't know what does, Review Done.

AWFUL-EDITING:
Now onto the god-awful editing which i can't blame the author on. This book went through two publishing houses and i'm still not sure it even had an editor, and if it did, well it must have been a freaking intern.
It was sooo distracting. I'm not saying there were a lot of problems but far more than you would expect from profesionals. With notes from a decent editor maybe i'd know what callowmilk actually does too, but here are some of the other editorial problems.

* At least 3 parts which could have been clearer, ironically the least clear moment is the concept of 'All Clear'
* There's at least two lines with words wrong but i can't find them again right now.
* A list of the planets and who owns them ends with the phrase 'all present and correct' except it doesn't include Uranus and i still have no idea which country owns Uranus.
* A not-a-buffalo creature has waving feathers except it was just described in the preceding paragraph and it had no feathers, just fur.
* A character has the nickname Dr.Callow, the text says something like 'he couldn't think of anything someone would call him except Dr.Callow', then the next line is "Hi". NO!, the next line should clearly have been "Hi, my name is Dr.Callow", otherwise why mention his nickname at all.
* A cast list of characters and actors is given, it starts with the actor names on the left but randomly switches halfway through.
* A woman wearing a Cyclops-mask suddenly switches pronouns on the next page.
* A chapter which consists entirely of a letter from Uranus' moon Miranda is marked as The Moon, instead of Uranus.

Errors like these are really just pathetic in a professional publication :# .

[Chris Berko · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a scene about half way into Reservoir Dogs where Mr Orange is developing his "story" for the undercover work he's about to do. His boss encourages him to have one, says every great undercover officer has a "story", and the next ten minutes of the film is truly some genius filmmaking,among the best sequences ever filmed. We watch Mr. Orange go from reading the story, to reciting the story, to acting it out, to adding his own flavor and presenting it, to finally when he's telling the story to the people he's infiltrating and he tells the story so well that we get to see it acted out on the screen like it's really happening. Like I said, genius filmmaking, if you haven't seen it that's one of the top five movies of all-time, check it out.

So I explain that because this book was structured in sort of the same way. We get the filmmakers talking about what they want in their movies, to them writing it, to filmmakers filming it, to the movies themselves and lastly we get a couple of critics sharing what they think of everything at various times throughout.

The pieces were there and anything about movie making is right up my alley but I wish I could say that this was great. There were some really cool ideas and there is definitely a shit ton of imagination on display here but I felt absolutely nothing for the entirety of the read. A couple sense of wonder moments but that was more for background or scenery stuff never for any of the characters and it all sort of felt flat at the end. Some of it was epistolary which I adore and this was done right but where that usually draws me into the story, here it kept me at a distance. I also got annoyed at some of the repetition in later chapters. Here's what we call a tree, but the tree is not a tree it is a... with... And here is a steak but it is not a steak it is a... from... Here is a whale but it is not a whale it is a... with... And so on and so forth. At 150 pages this would have been the awesome, at 400+, mmmmmm not so much.

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly brilliant read, one of my favourites of the year so far. This book is incredibly written, with a fascinating well thought out structure and a brilliant world fantastically built. There is so much in this book that it almost shouldn't work - and yet it does, brilliantly. I would highly recommend.

[Figgy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The press release for this book describes it as “a decopunk pulp SF alt-history space opera mystery set in a Hollywood, and solar system, very different from our own” and if you think that sounds complicated, you have no idea.

I’m not going to lie; this is not an easy book to get into, and it’s not a light read. This is not the sort of thing you can pick up while on the edge of sleep, when your brain has started shutting down and you just want to relax.

Stories are like that. They love havoc, especially their own.
Many of these stories involve sleep. That is because we are all afraid of sleeping. We know it deep in our blood and our marrow. A panther, a bear, a Cro-Magnon may find a child while she’s sleeping. And so we tell tales of a girl who pricked her finger on a navigational array and fell asleep for a hundred years. A girl who ate an apple that wasn’t really an apple and fell into a deep sleep until a handsome businessman with a Kleen-Krop patent came along and kissed her awake again. A wise scientist who gave away his notes for free, so his assistant put him to sleep in a tree forever.

This book requires your attention, and it requires a lot of work, especially at the start.This is a thinking-person’s… decopunk, pulp, SF… in an attempt to be concise, let’s just call it speculative fiction!

The rest of this review can be found HERE!

[Mara · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNFed @ 150 pages-- Though I did enjoy this one substantially more than Space Opera, I realized at some point that while I can admire the project here, I did not care about it. For me, this is more style than substance, and I didn't enjoy the style enough to continue. I'm very sadly reaching the conclusion that this author may just not be for me... which bums me out. I really like the idea of this book & the idea of her works more broadly. I'll give her one more shot with "The Girl Who Navigated...", but if that one doesn't work for me, I'm going to have to just accept that this is not an author for me :*(

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A technically brilliant epistolary book with wonderful language, but nowhere to hang my hat.

This is the story of Severin Unck and her disappearance and Anchises, a mysterious boy that's the only survivor of a village on Venus in a bizarre version of our solar system which roughly matches the fictionalizations of the early 20th century. Every planet is habitable and inhabited by alien life and travel between planets is relatively easy. Severin is a film-maker, and the daughter of a renowned film-maker and the story is saturated by the aesthetics of early 20th century movie-making.

The story is told via a number of different mechanisms. Transcripts of the movies of Severin Unck, the story of an evolving script that her father Percy is putting together about her disappearance and the boy Anchises, transcripts of secret interviews with Severin's defacto husband Erasmo and various other bits and pieces including some of Percy's home movies. The time period that's covered is vast as well with pieces as far apart as 1911 and 1971, even though Severin herself only lived into her 30s.

As is typically with Valente, the language is amazing. The story-telling mechanism is also brilliant, and it's clear that Valente herself as first-hand knowledge of what it's like to be a child of a film-maker. However, these are people to be watched. There the sort that I don't read celebrity magazines to find out about. People who are always partly on, ready to be written about or filmed. As such, I have trouble engaging with them, and a great deal of trouble empathizing with.

The eventual solution to the mystery is logical. It's certainly a reasonable conclusion, although a bit of a cheat. I'm not sure if it was worthwhile slogging through 400 pages of largely self-indulgent prose to get through though. If the prose was less beautiful, this would have been 3 stars, but it's Catherynne Valente, she probably writes her shopping list in sonnet form just because she can ...

[Thomas Wagner | SFF180 · Rating 3 out of 5]

After some days of thought, realizing I admired this a bit more than I initially thought, settled on 3.5.

Radiance is a book whose brilliance is in some ways a liability. It's impossible to deny the mastery of its craft, but if you aren't prepared for what you're getting into you can easily find yourself overwhelmed early on. It throws up so many layers of artifice that it's difficult to feel much but the most cursory emotional investment in its characters. But the way in which the book is essentially about its own artifice, without being tediously meta, is probably its most inspired storytelling hook. It's a novel about how our lives are narratives, and how those narratives can become grand and mythic and larger than all possible life when others add to them. Radiance may be a novel that is easier to admire at an intellectual level than enjoy as entertainment, but there's no doubt Catherynne Valente is an often astonishing talent, even if the kitchen-sink approach she's taken to Radiance means that form trumps content more often than not.

The novel is an art-deco planetary romance set in the early-to-mid 20th century, in an alternate history where the human race has long colonized the entire solar system. Space is something not quite a vacuum, and all the planets are closer together and teeming with life. Venus is a lush and tropical world covered in oceans, the Moon is an airy resort, and even distant Pluto is verdant and populated by packs of giant buffalo-lizard things. It's connected physically to its moon Charon by a bridge of vines covered in dazzling flowers.

The story deals with the mysterious disappearance of Severin Unck... ( continued )

[Erika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Things I know to be (sort-of) true about this book:

01. It's unlike everything I've ever read. It is quite possibly the strangest book I've ever read, but in the very best way.

02. Nothing is real and everything is real at the same time.

03. I have no idea what really happened there at the end, but I believe that that's the point. I love a messy ending, so for me, it works. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who likes their stories tied up with neat little ribbons at the end. It left me feeling a bit puzzled, but at the same time felt right.

04. Valente's writing leaves me breathless. Radiance is so stylistically different from Fairyland, which makes sense--a little grittier and darker, but still shiny and wonderful and breathtaking.

05. This is not a book to sit down and read in one sitting. This is a book to be chewed on, savored, and then spit back out.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm in love the worlds that Valente creates in this, along with the central mysteries and characters, but ultimately felt a little let down when it came to how it all hung together. Very glad I read it, though.

[Liviu · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting novel though a little frustrating in that the story doesn't ultimately cohere and the strange, occasionally awesome universe building feels underutilized in the end; of course one can look in a different way at the novel and see the above as a feature not a bug, but at least for me this would require a different style that would captivate me mostly through the words not the story or world building as here

overall, I would say that if you are a fan of the author and love her writing style, you will probably enjoy this one more as I liked the premise and the way the story was told (see the blurb for details) but felt a bit underwhelmed in the end with a "this is all??" feeling