Title: The Vanished Birds
By: Simon Jimenez
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: B07QVGZKS9
Pages: 386
Genre: Poetry
Synopsis
A solitary ship captain, drifting through time.
Nia Imani is a woman out of place. Traveling through the stars condenses decades into mere months for her, though the years continue to march steadily onward for everyone she has ever known. Her friends and lovers have aged past her. She lives only for the next paycheck, until the day she meets a mysterious boy, fallen from the sky.
A mute child, burdened with unimaginable power.
The scarred boy does not speak, his only form of communication the haunting music he plays on an old wooden flute. Captured by his songs and otherworldly nature, Nia decides to take the boy in to live amongst her crew. Soon, these two outsiders discover in each other the things they lack. For him, a home, a place of love and safety. For her, an anchor to the world outside of herself. For both of them, a family. But Nia is not the only one who wants the boy.
A millennia-old woman, poised to burn down the future.
Fumiko Nakajima designed the ships that allowed humanity to flee a dying Earth. One thousand years later, she now regrets what she has done in the name of progress. When chance brings Fumiko, Nia, and the child together, she recognizes the potential of his gifts, and what will happen if the ruling powers discover him. So she sends the pair to the distant corners of space to hide them as she crafts a plan to redeem her old mistakes.
But time is running out. The past hungers for the boy, and when it catches up, it threatens to tear this makeshift family apart.
About the Author
From an early age, Simon Jimenez devoured genre fiction. “I loved everything that wasn’t reality,” he says. He spent much of his childhood researching which books won the major science fiction prizes each year, then seeking those titles out. But even as those iconic works were beginning to mold him as a young writer, Jimenez couldn’t escape the sense that something was missing from them: people like himself, a gay person of mixed-race heritage.
“A lot of the science fiction I grew up reading, all the characters were straight, and most of them were white, and that wasn’t something that really represented my own experience,” says Jimenez, who is half-Filipino. “I just wanted to add whatever little I could to what feels like a growing wave of new genre.”
Jimenez’s debut, The Vanished Birds, is his attempt to better represent his own experience within a sci-fi framework, but it’s no “little” addition to the genre landscape. Diverse in both its cast of characters and the scope of its ideas, it combines satisfyingly complex science fiction concepts—interstellar travel via folding time, humanity’s future in the stars and more—with an emotional core that feels at once intimate and grand. It evokes the fate of a universe while also focusing with deft intensity on the bonds that form between lost people.
