127 pages
Published 2024
Read from December 1 to December 2
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Sofia Samatar became one of my favorite authors thanks to exactly one book: A Stranger in Olondria. I’ve wanted to read The Winged Histories for years, but just haven’t done so, for various reasons. One of the reasons: It’s become increasingly difficult for me to focus, so the lush density of Samatar’s prose requires me to be in a certain headspace, which I just haven’t found that often lately. A novella is the perfect opportunity to savor her writing once more, as I slowly build back my attention span.
This is a beautiful yet harrowing examination of caste, class, captivity, exploitation, and community aboard a mining ship in endless orbit. It is a story about making sense of the conditions we’re born into, about ways of looking. It is about systems of control and patterns of resistance, patterns of survival, the cruel math of the pampered classes. It is a tale immense beyond its page count.
Having read so much sci-fi from the sixties and seventies, all those smug white men writing tales of white boy messiahs who bridge the cosmic links between ordinary people, it’s a revelation to read a story that actually does something meaningful with that framework, a story that finds the substance beyond the stale platitudes.
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