Saturday, December 14, 2019

Umbernight, by Carolyn Ives Gillman

Umbernight was a Locus novella nominee for 2018, the only one that is available online.  The story has a very classic feel--an explorer from a colony on a hostile planet leads a team of colonists on a mission to recover a shipment from Earth.  They have barely been surviving, in part because the planet is actually orbiting a binary with a nasty X-ray star, which was not anticipated.  The colony normally shelters through the long time when Umber's X-rays bathe the planet, but the X-ray season came early and the colonists were caught out.  They find that the planet is teeming with life, much of it hostile.  It's a good nostalgic tale, kind of like older Venus stories.  But less optimistic, more burnt out.

No comments:

Post a Comment

When the Moon Hits Your Eye, by John Scalzi

Scalzi is able to write humorous novels that get at deeper truths and really go places. "Red Shirts" and "The Kaiju Preservat...