I won’t say anything more specific because it should be the pleasure of the reader to journey through this remarkable novel and be in the moment as the story unfolds. Oh, and queerness is baked into this universe – a fact only remarkable in how some of the strong romantic connections between people indelibly affect their actions. This is not a world that is gentle with its characters, but the best moments come when a character gives themselves the grace to be gentle or loving and not molded by the universe’s hardness. The familiar notes of these types of stories are there in the framing, but told in a much more intimate way. It then asks what society those people’s ancestors would create generations down the line. This universe is a potential or alternate future, a look at what might happen as our planet gets more and more uninhabitable and those with means build ways to escape. Jimenez moves the story back and forth in time in jumps of thousands of years and in decades, filling out the world of the book. How do we deal with the messy emotions that come with sacrifice and desire? What if we live long enough to see the unintended consequences of our decisions? This small story sets up the big themes of the book: how does a person figure out what they’re really meant for? How do we find and define family?

This now old man gives the mysterious young boy a flute that the cargo captain gave to him, and the boy, the flute, and the captain leave the man behind. However, his true destiny may lie in helping and caring for another young boy-a boy who appears in a fiery wreckage out of nowhere but who is unharmed. The boy grows up and becomes leader of his village, thinking this is the special destiny his father predicted, but he is always haunted by a yearning for the stars-and for the captain of the cargo ship, with whom he has a dalliance. The most exciting thing that happens is the arrival of the ships, whose crews never age due to the effects of interstellar travel.

It is a rural society, divided into hunters and farmers. He lives on a Resource World: a planet that is used to grow a crop that is harvested, saved and exported off-world every fifteen years by cargo ships. Simon Jimenez’s sweeping space opera, “The Vanished Birds,” starts out small, with what could be a stand-alone novella: a boy is born with an extra finger, and his father declares that he will be special.

The vanished birds simon jimenez