The Vanished Birds

"This book’s publisher, Titan, will be very well known to a lot of readers for the excellent nonfiction work they do with big coffee table film books and similar, but over recent years have been very active in publishing their own lists of science fiction, fantasy and horror. They’ve picked up a lot of great authors, and Simon Jimenez is no exception. If the following book, Vagabonds , is near-space, our own solar system, then The Vanished Birds is very definitively space opera. Of course. Space opera is always so difficult to define, but I’ll give it a go. I would suggest that if a story allows for the possibility of intergalactic travel without the several thousand years wait it should take to get to the nearest star, you’re probably in space opera territory. It doesn’t have to be a Star Wars style evil galactic empire but we’re definitely talking about spacefaring civilisation or civilisations, where the actual collapse of the journey required has been solved by means that might be called hand waving…. Or it might be very well worked out! One of my favourite examples of solving the faster than light trick is a book called Light by M. John Harrison —which was nominated for the Clarke Award; he won it in 2007 with the sequel, Nova Swing —where basically every civilisation in the universe will evolve very different mathematics and philosophical concepts of how the universe works, and because that’s how they model the universe all the methods work even if they work on contradictory physics… It plays very cleverly with quantum uncertainty principles so civilisations ends up with something like a sort of Schrodinger’s drive; if you don’t believe it, you can’t get the engine to start. Hopefully that’s not too off the cuff a sense of what space opera is, and to get more specific this next book, The Vanished Birds , opens with an absolute classic of that intergalactic perspective—picture a very distant planet, a very low tech planet that was colonised in some distant past and is now home to generations of farmers. Every 15 years, the skies open and a fleet of ships descend upon the fields. The ships are described as being made of metal and cloth—and we don’t know whether we’re seeing this through the eyes of somebody who just doesn’t know what they’re seeing or if it’s a literal description—but it’s a very beautiful image that remind me of Sir Arthur’s famous line that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. These spaceships sail in to collect the harvests and the people on the ships are travelling at post-relativity speeds, so they are ageing at a very different speed. A character on the planet would see the same spaceship crew member as having aged perhaps a year in the time they have aged 15 themselves. The planet’s farmers might not see it, but as readers suddenly we’re exposed to this vast gulf of relative time and the number of generations that might have lived and died, cut off on their planet while working to supply an intergalactic marketplace they never see for themselves. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And it’s a beautifully written book. It doesn’t spend too much time explaining these technologies. This ‘ship of cloth’ and so on. One of the joys of space opera, of course, is that because we’re far future (or perhaps a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) the need to explain these magical technologies is lessened and you can just give yourself to the dream. It’s interesting to discuss this book and the collapsing of intergalactic space travel into something entirely non-magic, almost mundane, in the lives of a spacefaring civilisation (especially perhaps in those moments where characters don’t know they are part of this much larger world beyond their own). It references back to many other classics of science fiction as well—so for those who like to see lineage in their science fiction, you’ll definitely have fun tracing back all of the different links in this book. However, as a first time author, Simon is exploring this from a very different cultural background, even if he’s picking up on ideas that have been part of the science fiction toolkit forever, basically. When our judges come to their deliberations, they might look at a book where the fictional far future has some familiar touchpoints but be drawn in by an author’s new direction of travel. It’s a difficult trick to pull off, but that spirit of continual reinvention is what’s powered science fiction all these years."

"The Vanished Birds is a novel that is thoughtful, character-driven, and literary. As it also features interstellar travel, time jumps , teleportation, and corporate skullduggery, I believe it can be said to creep over the line into space opera. It’s a beautifully written debut novel with so much to say about corporate malfeasance and colonization, all of it managed with the kinds of intrigue, gripping action scenes, and a strong plot line featuring “found family” that give it the larger-than-life feeling that space opera is so good at when done right. I would argue that fantasy can depend on advanced technology—if by advanced technology we mean ‘advanced for its day.’ Some fantasy books do explain the technology that is vital to their plots—for example, Ken Liu ’s Dandelion Dynasty series—although it’s true many do not and may rely on an assumption that fantasy worlds are set in the ‘primitive’ past even though there are, say, Roman aqueducts still standing two thousand years after they were built. Technology is a continuum and technological advancement has been going on among humans for millennia. At the same time, it’s true there is a style or sub-genre of science fiction that specifically goes into detail about technology, physics, and so on. In my experience space opera does tend to gloss over the technologies and the science in favor of a focus on action, characterization, and big set pieces."