Radiance

Starred review from August 17, 2015
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. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.

Starred review from June 15, 2015
Valente imagines an alternate solar system and sends her heroine, a filmmaker, to Venus, where she disappears. Severin Unck is a headstrong and passionate young woman, a director of documentaries whose hints of confession are as artful and scripted as only someone who grew up with the movies can manage. The daughter of a famous director in the old Hollywood mold, Severin lives in a universe where the movie industry occupies the moon but films remain silent and where various planets are claimed by the Earth's nations but persist in being flamboyantly alien. When Severin travels to Venus to make a film about a colony that vanished, leaving only unsettling rumors behind, it becomes her last creation-she never returns. The story of her disappearance emerges in a variety of forms and voices-gossip columns, fragments of screenplays, diary entries, advertisements, and, in a dizzying layering of fictions, a movie made by her father that mutates from noir to gothic to fairy tale. The narrative stretches back to her childhood and forward to the investigation following her crew's return, veering from tense adventure to sly probing of how we choose to make the stories of our lives. An unnamed narrator claims it's a story of seeing and being seen. "We shall endeavor to make ourselves equally naked, equally bare, equally vulnerable to iris and pupil, whose bites are ever so much fiercer than teeth." Valente's (The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, 2015, etc.) 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.

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October 1, 2015
Multiple-award-winner Valente's unique style makes her latest novel a challenging and exhilarating read. Using a panoply of formats and styles related to filmmaking and crime solving, Valente, author of Palimpsest (2009) and the best-selling YA The Girl Who . . . series, takes the reader on a nonlinear, solar-system-spanning journey through the history of moviemaking and the bizarre realities of life on wildly imagined inhabited planets. Percival Unck, the greatest and most famous filmmaker of all time, is the father of Severin Unck, a beautiful documentary filmmaker in her own right who disappears on an ill-fated investigation on Venus where city-size beings who live in the vast seas provide the special milk that allows humans to live on other planets. The splendiferous prose swirls and twirls in a manic, vocabulary-enhancing dance in a world where silent black-and-white movies have never gone out of vogue. Expect Valente's hugely imaginative, retro adventure on multiple science-fiction- and fantasy-award short lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)