lightreads

The Vanished Birds

4/5. In a far future where Earth is unlivable and humanity is spread across corporate-controlled space stations and "resource worlds," the captain of a battered freighter goes on runs that take a few months for her and fifteen years for the universe, because FTL. Then a young boy literally falls out of the sky, and she takes him on for reasons to raise in real time, since he may have the secret of instantaneous travel.

I was hearing whispers about this book pre-pub in ways that stuck out as notably genuine as opposed to . . . y'know. Things about how strange and beautiful this debut is. It is both those things – it's scifi about the folding of time across lives, and having a home to come back to once you have flung yourself outward. It puts me in mind a little bit of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven in its construction, and I would be remiss if I did not also mention "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" as a useful companion text.

So yeah, this is a lovely mechanism of a book that rewards attention – the more you focus in, the more ways it fits together on the smaller and smaller scale. I do think some pieces of it feel overbaked if you take them head on, but then slot in nicely if you tilt your head and consider them as parts of a slantwise dark scifi fairy tale.

Content notes: Child harm.