Radiance
RadianceCatherynne M. Valente
Buy on Amazon

Radiance (2001)

Catherynne M. Valente

Others: Positive

Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 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.

ISBN:
9780765335296
Length:
432 pages

Genres: science fiction

Lists: …

Similar books

1 of 6
  • Caliban's war

    James S. A. Corey

    2012 · 608 pages · 9 reviews

    Others: Overwhelmingly positive

    The second book in the NYT best-selling Expanse series, Caliban's War shows a solar system on the brink of war, and the only hope of peace rests on James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante's shoulders. Now a Prime Original series. We are not alone. On Ganymede, breadbasket of the outer planets, a Martian marine watches as her platoon is slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth, a high-level politician struggles to prevent interplanetary war from reigniting. And on Venus, an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet, wreaking massive, mysterious changes and threatening to spread out into the solar system. In the vast wilderness of space, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have been keeping the peace for the Outer Planets Alliance. When they agree to help a scientist search war-torn Ganymede for a missing child, the future of humanity rests on whether a single ship can prevent an alien invasion that may have already begun...

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also science fiction
    75%
    Similar descriptions
    25%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • Sea of Tranquility

    Emily St. John Mandel

    1999 · 248 pages · 12 reviews

    Others: Mostly positive

    Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also science fiction
    76%
    Books and Things loved both
    13%
    Similar descriptions
    11%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • Dark light

    Ken MacLeod

    2001 · 292 pages · 1 review

    Others: Positive

    As the humans of Earth finally achieve space travel, they discover that the universe is filled with an infinite variety of intelligent alien life and that they have become pawns in the deadly wars of the alien gods.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also science fiction
    77%
    Similar descriptions
    23%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • The Reality Dysfunction

    Peter F. Hamilton

    1996 · 960 pages · 1 review

    Others: Positive

    Space is not the only void...In AD 2600 the human race is finally beginning to realize its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets scattered across the galaxy host a multitude of prosperous and wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary spaceborn creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive on the wealth created by the industrialization of entire star systems. And throughout inhabited space the Confederation Navy keeps the peace. A true golden age is within our grasp. But now something has gone catastrophically wrong. On a primitive colony planet a renegade criminal's chance encounter with an utterly alien entity unleashes the most primal of all our fears. An extinct race which inhabited the galaxy aeons ago called it "The Reality Dysfunction." It is the nightmare which has prowled beside us since the beginning of history. The Reality Disfunction is a modern classic of science fiction, an extraordinary feat of storytelling on a truly epic scale.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also science fiction
    78%
    Similar descriptions
    22%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • Floating worlds

    Cecelia Holland

    1975 · 465 pages · 1 review

    Others: Positive

    2000 years in the future, runaway pollution has made the Earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus and the Moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes. On the fringes of the solar system, in the Gas Planets, a strange, new, violent kind of human has evolved.In this unstable system the anarchist Paula Mendoza, an agent of the Committee, works to make peace, and ultimately protect her people, in a catastrophic clash of worlds that destroys the order she knows.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also science fiction
    80%
    Similar descriptions
    20%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • The Martian Chronicles

    Ray Bradbury

    1950 · 222 pages · 5 reviews

    Others: Overwhelmingly positive

    This is a collection of science fiction short stories, cleverly cobbled together to form a coherent and very readable novel about a future colonization of Mars. As the stories progress chronologically the author tells how the first humans colonized Mars, initially sharing the planet with a handful of Martians. When Earth is devastated by nuclear war the colony is left to fend for itself and the colonists determine to build a new Earth on Mars.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also science fiction
    80%
    Similar descriptions
    20%
    Personalize your recommendations

Reviews1

Loved it

it is fantastic and I really I really don't know how she did it because his book shouldn't work like there is so much in this book and it's so complicated but somehow Katherine and Valente pulls it off magnificently and it is incredible