Love as Long and Deep and Wide as the Universe

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

Here’s why this book will be on my top books of 2020: when you read the 6 blurbs on the back of the book, they state with confidence a completely different interpretation of the book. Kirkus: what they’d sacrifice for progress. Publishers Weekly: failing to learn from one’s mistakes. Booklist: found families and lost loves. Indra Das: galactic progress and its crushing fallout. Kate Elliot: blistering commentary on capitalism and colonialism. Library Journal: emotional attachment with time travel? Did they get a prepub draft instead of a preprint galley? It goes through time, but the only real time travel is memory and frozen on a space ship-not “time travel” to most sci-fi readers.
At any rate, Simon Jimenez has reached the pinnacle of the novelist’s true dream: to speak in tongues, so that all who read get the message they need. Told through space opera; more of an intellectual and emotional space opera than the shoot ‘em up kind. The shoot’em up kind don’t usually leave lingering flute music in your dreams. Though it may inspire some martial music in your soul. Read, ponder, weep and wonder. Truly an epic.
My take? The theme is the vast, unknowable consequences of love.

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