"the radiant car thy sparrows drew"

[sergebroom]

May I draw your attention to Catherynne Valente's short story "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew", published by online magazine ClarkesWorld? It is set in the late 20th Century, but one where our solar system is teeming with life, and people can travel from one world to others in balloons. The story covers the last film - a talkie - ever made by Bisshe, who is known as the Documentarian because it is her opinion should only be made about what's real.

When she was seventeen, Bysshe and her beloved cinematographe, George, followed the Bedouin road to Neptune for two years, resulting in her elegaic And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly. There, they say, she learned her skill at the sculpting of titanium, aquatic animal handling, and a sexual variant of Samayika mediation developed by a cult of levitation on tiny Halimede, where the wind blows warm and violet.

Rumors later take her to Adonis, a village of Venus whose inhabitants milked the dreaming callowwhales of the sea until one day, when all people disappeared. All but one child.

I hope you like it too. While you're at it, you might want to get Valente's book In The Night Garden, with its stories within stories within stories.

Comments

[ckd]

Her "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy" (in the anthology Federations) is also stunning, and there are several other very good stories in the anthology as well.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I remember reading about that story. I'll right way go add that anthology to my list of books to look for next time I go to a bookstore.