Additionally, while The Vanished Birds devotes plenty of time to large-scale horrors of corporate colonialism and to individual decisions between equally appealing (or unappealing) options, it rarely offers clear resolutions.
Splitting the narrative so many ways does make for a story that meanders, and while the quality of the prose and of the side characters keeps it engaging during the digressions, the structure and pacing are out-of-step with contemporary genre trends and won’t appeal to every reader. These aren’t anomalies-there are several other examples of significant page time given to secondary or tertiary perspectives-and they really work, with these beautifully written secondary vignettes yielding some of the most engrossing sections of the book.
We see another chapter made up predominantly of journal entries written by a side character in the main plot. We see an entire chapter that feels like a stand-alone novelette, dedicated to the life of a character we’ll never meet again. While there are three characters and one plot line that I would consider central, The Vanished Birds is made up of myriad smaller stories just as much as it is a couple big ones. Against this backdrop, we see several perspective characters forced to make the best of conflicts between work and relationships, or between two incompatible relationships, where everything gained is paid in something important lost. The story takes place in a far future where space has been colonized by corporate interests, but travel between planets is limited to journeys through Pocket Space, in which little time passes for the travelers but years go by for those on either end. The Vanished Birds is another book that I didn’t know much about before award nominations came out, but Simon Jimenez was nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer on the strength of this debut, so I thought it was well worth a shot.īefore starting, I had heard that The Vanished Birds was a space opera with strong found family themes, but that description doesn’t come close to capturing the literary tapestry that makes up the novel.
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