How It Unfolds

Gah! This was so interesting! Personally, I love to read alternative creation myths. If Prometheus (2012) was interesting to you I think you would like this piece of speculative fiction from the James S.A. Corey writing team.

The Novella follows Roy, he's a member of a planet colonization team. Well that's not entirely accurate. It's actually a copy of Roy that's a member of this team, all the members of this team are copies that are “beamed” out and “unfolded” on their target planets. His mission is to start the colonization process, and once they are able- to beam out a new copy to a new planet. Rinse and repeat.

What really makes this book cool is the non-traditional narrative. It quickly becomes unclear which Roy the narrative is following, with each new passage written from the perspective of a different Roy who made different choices in his life. I'm a fan of stories like this, and it's to the credit of Novellas as a medium, I don't think this would be a fun full-length book to read, but at just 37 attention-grabbing pages, this was short and sweet.

I mainly chose to read this because I wanted to check out a sample of James S.A. Corey's writing, so I was surprised to learn that this is part of the new The Far Reaches collection of novellas. These are a ton of cool stories by some of the best SF authors doing it right now, and they're in nice little non-intimidating chunks. I will definitely be checking out the other entries!