The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a deeply moving character-driven book that could have been a love child, a cross between Becky Chambers and Orson Scott Card at his very best.

It has the wonderful relationships and harrowing loss of interstellar travel including time dilation effects, colony worlds, and the people who must suffer such a life, but more than that, it goes beyond an almost litSF beautiful prose approach and heads straight into classic SF territory.

Let me be frank. I love this.

And I laughed out loud when I heard them refer to "Jaunt" because that is exactly what Alfred Bester called the event, the instant teleportation, in The Stars My Destination, but with an extra e "Jaunte". Of course, this doesn't have the same overriding revenge theme, but the sense of loss and pain and neverending desire makes them intensely similar.

And, of course, any novel that deals with the nastiest possibilities when it comes to faster than light travel will get two thumbs up from me.

So, yeah. A litSF with deep characters AND a hard SF tale is something I don't often see, but when I do, I treasure them, as I will treasure this.

Authors who know their audience are very, very appreciated. Thank you. :)

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