The Universe Next Door

Over at SciFi.com’s Sci Fi Weekly, Paul Di Filippo gives an A to Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky: Entire and the Rose: Book 1. He predicts the work will catapult Kay to the next level, due to “a bravura concept bolstered by fine writing; lots of plausible, thrilling action; old-fashioned heroism; and strong emotional hooks.”

Paul goes on to compare Kay’s work to the “planetary romances” of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edward Hamilton, with a shout out to recent works in this vein like Chris Roberson’s Paragaea. “Kenyon’s conceptual leap provides an environment conducive to prolonged Odysseus-like wanderings among exotic places, cultures and sentient beings. And she has a fertile enough imagination not to disappoint in this regard, conjuring up vivid races, ways of living and sights.”

But, he says, Kay is also “working in the Big Dumb Object territory exemplified by such past masters as Larry Niven, Bob Shaw, Greg Bear, Paul McAuley and, more recently, Karl Schroeder,” with the unusual cosmology of her invented world, the Entire.

And finally, he applauds her prose when he says, “Kenyon exhibits a clever narrative structural bent as well…. the mark of a fine writer.”

He ends with a comparison to Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers books. So, like, what are you waiting for?