What I Am Reading: "Radiance" by Catherynne M. Valente

I found this book while idly perusing Goodreads, on a list of Decopunk books. It melded very well with the podcast I have been listening to, You Must Remember This, about early Hollywood history and scandals. It even had a murder on a yacht, albeit a yacht afloat on the Sea of Tranquility.

Radiance is set in a universe where 1) humanity went to space much earlier, in spaceships blasted out of cannons (the technological specifics are not long dwelt upon), 2) the planets of the solar system are habitable and each have their own biomes, with Venus as a hothouse and Neptune covered in water and so on, similar to classic science fiction renderings of the solar system, and 3) films are largely still silent, due to zealous patent enforcement by the Edison family. The final fact would not seem as significant as the other two, if the story weren’t of Severin Unck, an avant guard documentary filmmaker. Severin, unlike her father Percival Unck, a famous director of gothics, works with sound. Prior to the start of the novel, Severin disappeared or died in mysterious circumstances on Venus. Venus is the most important planet in the solar system, as it is the home of the callowhales: gargantuan sea creatures that provide callowmilk, a necessary substance to keep human bones properly dense in the reduced gravity of space.

The story is told through found documents: largely the transcripts of films, radio shows, and interrogations, as well as excerpts from memoirs, columns, and so on. Part of the story retraces Severin’s ultimate fate; and another part of it is the synopsis of the film that her father, Percival, is making, in order to explain and grapple with her loss. Severin was making a documentary about a village on Venus that disappeared, and finds the disappearance to be connected to the callowhales. Another character, her lover Erasmo St. John, thinks that the callowhales were the reason she was there in the first place, as the “only unexplainable thing” that humans found while colonizing the solar system.

Severin was a widely known, respected, and beloved figure on the Moon, which became the interplanetary film colony in the place of Hollywood. Her father filmed continuously throughout her childhood, so many of the flashbacks take the form of transcripts of these home movies. Meanwhile, Percival’s film focuses upon the cursed child who was found by Severin, the only survivor of the aforementioned village. The film starts as a noir story in the fungal city of Uranus, shifts to a gothic story on Pluto, planet of the lotus-eaters, becomes the fairy tale of the character’s childhood on Venus, and then ends as a metatextual locked door murder mystery in order to best explain the resolution of the plot.

I liked this book for both its tribute to early Hollywood and for its embrace of a fantastic and dreamlike view of the solar system instead of one of hard science fiction. It invokes a bit of the Verne or the Burroughs spirit of pulp sci-fi, with cowboys on mars and jungles on Venus. Severin Unck was a haunting figure, and despite her end being a fait accompli, I was hoping she would be found alive in some way. I was not entirely disappointed.