The Vanished Birds

[psocoptera]

The Vanished Birds, Simon Jiminez. Jiminez is an Astounding nominee. I had this on my to-read list, although my note about why didn't bear much resemblance to the actual book; no idea now whether I read a misleading blurb somewhere or what. Anyways, this is from the literary arm of the SF galaxy which is sometimes a kind of thing I'm into but in this case sadly didn't work for me. I liked the first chapter but after that I never felt like it had any kind of trajectory, and I never felt like I had any idea why Jiminez had brought these various story elements together or what he was trying to do here. Writers can get away with that for me sometimes if their sentences are very beautiful but Jiminez didn't seem to me to be writing for language in that way. And for a novel that wanted to grapple with time dilation/clocks running at different speeds, the nuts and bolts of that seemed pretty fuzzy, like, sometimes statements got made about years or ages that just made no sense to me with how the characters were presented. General spoiler about a possible link to another book: the main plot, such as it is, has to do with teleportation, which gets referred to as "the Jaunt", which I believe is a The Stars My Destination reference; I haven't actually read TSMD, and so it's possible that there are more references here and the book might read differently if you have the right context. On the other hand nobody on Goodreads seems to be saying that, although, wow, a lot of people seem to have read a much better book than I did. Tastes vary, I guess!