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Radiance
433 pages
A glittering, tragic space opera told through a collage of scripts and secrets, exploring the stories we invent to survive the people we lose.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping into a haunted, golden-age Hollywood cinema where the projector is running a beautiful, fragmented dream. It is a deeply meandering, atmospheric experience that prioritizes lush language and emotional texture over a straightforward plot. The narrative unfolds through a dazzling, mixed-media collage of screenplays, gossip columns, and diaries, creating a world that is simultaneously opulent and steeped in melancholy. It is a story about the nature of storytelling itself, exploring how we use art to process grief and mythologize the people we have lost. Readers who delight in maximalist, poetic prose and retro-futuristic worlds will find themselves completely absorbed in this tragic, theatrical, and ultimately unforgettable cinematic illusion.
- Mood
- dreamlike
- cinematic
- nostalgic
- haunting
- opulent
- Tone
- theatrical
- elegiac
- whimsical
- wry
- melancholic
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- the nature of storytelling · grief and memory · art versus reality · mythologizing of women · retro-futurism
- The writing
- Baroque, exuberant, and fiercely poetic, told through a dazzling collage of screenplays, gossip columns, diaries, and interviews.
- The arc
- Moves from the glittering, wide-eyed wonder of a golden-age Hollywood space opera into a fragmented, deeply moving meditation on grief and the impossibility of knowing the truth.
- Who it's for
- Lovers of mixed-media narratives, gorgeous, maximalist prose, and atmospheric worldbuilding who prefer emotional resonance over linear plotting.
Content notes
- grief
- missing persons
- parental loss of a child
About the book
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.
Description from Open Library.
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