Best Science Fiction - The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
I would like to thank Sarah from Titan for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Titan
Published – Out Now
Price – £8.99 paperback £4.68 Kindle eBook
Nia Imani is a woman out of place and outside of time. Decades of travel through the stars are condensed into mere months for her, though the years continue to march steadily onward for everyone she has ever known. The captain of a transport ship contracted to the Umbrai corporation, she lives only for the next paycheck, until the day she meets a mysterious boy, fallen from the sky.
A boy, broken by his past, and hunted by his present. For he is one of the few born with the gift of the Jaunt. The ability to travel instantly anywhere in the universe. An ability that threatens the vicelike control of the settled worlds by corporations such as Umbrai.
Fumiko Nakajima, the great scientist responsible for the design of bird-like Stations that Umbrai uses to control vast tracts of space, has been searching for one such as he for a thousand years.
Together, they set out to protect the boy, a journey that will cross the decades and light years all the way out to the fringes of settled space where the laws of civilisation do not apply, and they will have only each other to rely on.
I think many of us recently have all become used to waiting long periods for things to happen. The ‘great and terrible pause’ as the Goode Street Podcast called 2020 made us change – we waited for life to resume; we worried, we learnt new skills, we felt lost – time passed slowly (or terrifyingly quickly). In Simon Jimenez’s brilliant science fiction novel The Vanished Birds we are taken less on a space opera and and more a space symphony in a tale that does amazing things with character perspectives, time and most of all a study of human emotions that is unforgettable.
Usually when I review, I’ll give you a quick non spoilerish summary of the plot but what makes this story special is each chapter itself could easily work as a short story focusing on a character, a world or length of time. We start with a young child named Kaedra who grows up on a backwater planet famous for its harvest that is picked up by space merchants every 15 years. Kaedra as a child is entranced by one who turns out to be Nia a captain of a spaceship. As a young man 15 years later, he meets Nia again properly and they have a brief but passionate affair for one night. The chapter explores all the joys and tragedies of Kaedra’s life from love, scandal, injury and becoming a parent and every fifteen years he captures with Nia – who thanks to relativity and the way space travel works in this tale is never older while each time he is greying and changing. Jimenez in a single chapter makes us see an entire life. But Kaedra although will impact Nia’s future thoughts is not a main character. This chapter alone would be worth reading but it really a prologue as Kaedra finds a young child in wreckage that came from space – a child who won’t talk and seems strange attracting superstitious fears from the villages so Kaedra as an old man makes Nia take him into space to find a home.
Jimenez then switches perspectives to Nia’s spaceship, and we see a grumpy found family of space merchants preparing a trip home after 15 years of faster than light travel. From a low-tech pastoral setting we are in a grimy super hi-tech universe of corporations and so many planets that Kaedra’s world are largely unaware of. We explore the crew’s tensions to the arrival of the young boy who we come to know as Ahro who is processing PTSD based on his past that he won’t tell anyone about. In fifty pages we get to know the crew, the dynamics and see space travellers arrive back home fifteen years later and having to acclimatise to changes of politics, fashion and even the local shops. Then the next chapter skips 1000 years to the dying days of the planet Earth where environmental collapse is well underway and we focus on the growing up of the genius Fumiko Nakajima who finds herself offered the work project of her dreams to create an amazing set of space stations that may represent the future of humanity or staying with a woman she has realised she is in love with. Alongside the description of the world falling apart we explore a battle between head and heart that has tragic consequences. Ones that will haunt Fumiko for the next millennia as she uses various deep sleep technologies to persevere her life and explore science and now with Ahro’s arrival she senses someone who could offer the opportunity for a test of a rumoured new way of travelling through space. Nia is hired with a different crew to spend fifteen years in space with Ahro to see if he shows any strange abilities and report back if he does.
And that dear reader is just four chapters! Each chapter is a musical suite of story in its own right and Jimenez’ approach is absolutely stunning. It’s like reading beautifully crafted pieces of a jigsaw each captivating in their own right and its’s as they slot together you see a larger epic story that manages to stay for each character in the chapter uniquely personal in approach, theme, character and even style. We get diary entries as a man sent to effectively spy on Nia actually finds he and his crewmates are becoming a family out in space. We witness Ahro’s development from silent teenager to skilled space traveller who also finds his first glimpse of love. We experience Nia’s loss of her first-choice crew through people just needing to move on and Fumiko’s world tragically implode as other corporations make their move. Each story plays with time in subtly different ways. Growing up and then living hundreds of years and then slowly losing key memories or watching a young child becoming a teenager in the backwaters of space. Characters shoot across the stage captivating us and then move on or tragically we see them die as the story gets darker and tenser
As a key piece of the SF is that space travel takes time each chapter aligns to that theme of people changing their loyalties, perspectives or knowledge over time. Each key character has to decide over a period what is important to them and where or even if they fit in the groups or relationships they find themselves in. As readers we too will see our reactions to characters shift as the story changes. We have a tale of big science, discovery, and betrayal but ultimately the focus is on a small group of humans learning to do the right thing with Nia and Ahro’s developing quasi-parental relationship the focus that the whole book spins around.
This was a delight to read. The use of changing perspectives and changes in time periods I’ve not seen so well constructed since Station Eleven but this time in the context of a space opera; despite this is less battles, wars, and empires but more a battle between greed and love that will change the galaxy and yet feels strangely intimate all aided by the beauty of Jimenez’s prose which was a joy to curl up into. Easily one of the best science fiction reads I’ve had this year and one I think everyone needs to pick up and try. Go get it!!
