This is a most impressive debut novel. A finalist for the Locus Award for 2020 and named one of the best books of the year by tordotcom and Kirkus Reviews, it was also selected by Jo Walton as one of the top 10 genre books of the first quarter of the 21st century. All of those honors are well deserved. In The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez has created memorable characters, crafted an intricate and epic plot spanning centuries and lightyears, and especially has done some extraordinary world building.
It’s the kind of world — or really universe — building in which the details are slowly revealed in the reading without a lot of tedious explication. He does that by first introducing us — in a bit of literary legerdemain — to a small character on a marginal world and then gradually enlarging the field of view, giving us more characters in more complex situations in various settings across vast time and space. By the time you realize the scope of the tale, you’re definitely hooked.
At the biggest of big pictures, this is a tale of galaxy spanning corporate capitalism — fascism, actually — and the struggles and fates of individuals who have to live within that structure. The first of these persons we meet is Kaeda, a young lad on a farming planet in the middle of nowhere. The people in scattered villages all grow one particular crop, which they harvest and store as they await the arrival of the hauler that comes to buy the crop every 15 years. He falls in love with a woman named Nia from the ship, and they carry on an affair of sorts, pairing up for a tryst every 15 years as he ages through young adulthood, middle age and then into his elder years, while she ages hardly at all.
The routine is interrupted by the arrival of a mute young boy who crashes onto the planet in a pod of some sort that’s destroyed in landing. Kaeda, now elderly and the village headman, takes the boy in to await the arrival of Nia, who he suspects will know what to do.
She does, and takes him on the ship of which she is the captain, and now our perspective shifts to Nia and her ship and crew. And we learn how space travel works in this universe. The ships travel routes via a mechanism similar to Star Trek‘s worm holes. The round trip journeys they take to and from Kaeda’s planet, which take 15 years of planetary time, last only weeks or months aboard ship.
A little farther on we meet Fumiko Nakajima, a brilliant engineer who has designed the fleet of bird-shaped orbital stations scattered around the galaxy. She’s spent most of her hundreds of years of life traveling the galaxy in cold sleep, and she seems to have an interest in the mystery boy. As does the galaxy-spanning corporate entity known as Umbai. When Fumiko, Umbai, Nia and the boy finally come together, it sets off a twisting adventure that spans decades and centuries, as the boy passes through puberty and into young adulthood, and everybody wonders whether he’ll develop the history making ability they suspect he has.
Aside from the adventure and space opera aspects of The Vanished Birds, this is a tale of traumatized persons. Everyone — Fumiko, Nia and her crew, the boy, the farmers exploited on their backwater planets — has been buffeted in some way by the corporate system and the cruelly competitive life it spawns. Jimenez’s characters all grapple with ways to live and survive in such a system while interacting with each other compassionately. Like all humans, they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, and it’s in those moments that the story of The Vanished Birds truly takes wing.
(Del Rey, 2020)
