You are less a citizen of these entities as you are a person under contract observe the full scope of your contractual obligations and you are fine, violate them and, well, you don’t want to violate is the best way to think about that.Įssentially if you play by the rules, you will enjoy privilege and care but fail to do so and the full weight of corporate law falls upon you, a sentence so harsh that one character in the book finds herself, and many others, condemned without so much as the whisper of a trial.

In this brave new world, or that should be worlds, human life has become corporatised, the end result of colonisation efforts driven by companies who competed with each other to build space stations, populate virginal worlds – there are no aliens in this part of the galaxy, or, perhaps ominously, none remaining anyway the corporations are ruthless and honestly genocide is not something they wouldn’t contemplate – and make money, lots and lots of money. It is, for all intents and purposes, an enthralling space opera in which we are introduced to a spaceborn human diasporic civilisation, 1000 years into their flight from Earth, which lies broken and ruined so far hence from what is known as Allied Space, that is initially a myth and legend and nothing more. Every novel worth its narrative salt should have an emotional hook that ensnares your reader heart.īut there’s something about the emotionally evocative wonder that is The Vanished Birds, the debut book by promising writer Simon Jimenez, that captures your heart (and mind and soul) far more deeply and irrevocably than many other novels occupying the genre.

The vanished birds book