We are now, according to my Kindle, 27% of the way through the book, and we have no idea what is going on. Fumiko names the stations, and designs their looks, after her favourite species of birds that she loved as a child, when there were birds. The project, developed in deepest secrecy by Umbai, costs Fumiko the love of her life, because loyalty to the company comes before all else. Fortunately their journey is not that long, and eventually they find themselves once again approaching Pelican Station.Ĭhapter 3 takes us back to the dying Earth, where a young woman engineer called Fumiko Nakajima is about to make a name for herself by designing the magnificent space stations that Umbai Corporation would one day build as homes for those people rich enough to flee their wreck of a planet and make a new home among the stars. Her crew are not overly enamoured of the strange boy who cannot speak, but appears obsessed with music. As the boy is an outworlder, Kaeda gives him to Nia to take care of.Ĭhapter 2 takes place aboard the starship Debby.

The only other piece of plot is that Kaeda rescues a strange young boy from a crashed spacecraft. Thanks to relativity, Nia barely ages from one Shipment Day to another, while Kaeda becomes a man, then a leader of his people, then old. Ursula K Le Guin… Kim Stanley Robinson… Simon Jimenez.” Presumably Baxter was comparing Jimenez to those other SF luminaries, and the PR people at Titan had to butcher his second sentence to get it to fit on the cover.įrom there things get a little more confusing, because The Vanished Birds does not follow any accepted ideas of how to open a novel.Ĭhapter 1 is all about a young farmer called Kaeda who develops an obsession with a woman from the space fleet that comes to his planet every fifteen years to buy their produce. There’s a spacecraft scene, so we should be expecting a space opera, and then there is this very odd quote from Stephen Baxter that reads, “An astonishing debut. The cover on my edition is a little weird. And the other day Roz Kaveney phoned me up to rave about it. It is now in the top ten list for Debut Novel in this year’s Locus Awards. I had been unaware of his debut novel until recently. Simon Jimenez is one of the finalists for this year’s Astounding Award.

The vanished birds simon jimenez