Radiance

A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it..

Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions-if you've been a good lab and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is must a long seduction of the ending.

Radiance is a decopunk science fiction alt-history novel by Catherynne M. Valente.

Taking place in an Alternate Universe where space travel and colonization on other planets are an everyday part of life by 1986, the story tells about Severin Unck, the adopted daughter of a famous Gothic filmmaker. Severin herself made a name for herself filming documentaries until she vanished without a trace while doing a film about a lost colony on Venus. What follows is a series of documents, transcripts, letters, diary entries, and newspaper columns, all detailing Severin's life from her childhood to her disappearance as well as the lives of those closest to her.

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Tropes used in Radiance include:

• Adult Fear: The transcripts of Percy trying to plan a movie to give himself closure over Severin's disappearance show just how much he misses her and wishes he'd done better caring for her.
• Affectionate Nickname: Severin is called "Rinny" (or occasionally "Rin") by her father and her boyfriend.
• Ambiguous Situation: The scene in the hotel, when Anchises somehow holds a summation gathering that includes people who were already dead, in order to find out what happened to Severin. While the whole thing is done as a scene from Percy's movie, the end of the book suggests that the conclusions reached about Severin's fate and the role callow whales play in the universe were all correct, despite there being no way for that to be known.
• Bittersweet Ending: Nobody ever does find out what happens to Severin, but Percy does find some consolation in making a movie about it to give himself closure. The readers learn that Severin was vaporized by a callow whale, which means she can never return to her old life, but now can explore the countless dimensions open to her.
• Body Horror: A callow milk commercial mentions that there's a campaign against the product, due to beliefs that it causes birth defects in children. The callow whale Severin meets at the end reveals that humans were never meant to drink their milk and that their descendants will have very interesting appearances down the line. An image of those decendents reveals that they'd end up fern-like
• Break The Cutie: Poor Anchises starts off as a child who wants nothing more than to see a callow whale and innocently wishes for his family's happiness. By the time Severin finds him, he's the only person left in Adonis, walking in circles, blinking in and out of existence, and so incoherent that he screams when Severin hugs him. Things don't get much better from there, as he's beat up by one of the film crew members, when he tries to prevent the only footage of Severin's last document from being destroyed. He spends a lot of his life leaving his adopted father to run around the galaxy and, by the time her reaches his thirties, is withdrawn and tired.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Melancholia knows full well that Anchises, a Defective Detective still messed up from a decade-long jaunt in another dimension isn't going to focus on finding what happened to Severin like she wants, so her employee, Cynthia Brass, is assigned to follow Anchises and make sure he actually does his job. Melacholia even tells Anchises that she knows he needs a nanny to keep him in line. Cynthia's not very happy about it.
• Crap Saccharine World: The planets are described as marvels to behold, but there are also riots, starvation, unfair laws, and more than one have been destroyed or vanished mysteriously.
• Daddy's Girl: As a child, Severin was devoted to her father. This changed when he told her he killed a man.
• Domestic Abuse: Penelope Edison is suppressed and denied the right to work by her husband.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!:
  • The end of the book reveals that one of Anchises's childhood friends actually told him not to touch the callow whale frond. Percy left that part out of his movie because he thought it was too on-the-nose.
  • Severin's desire to swim with a callow whale was so opposed by the rest of the crew that one of the members punched her to try to convince her otherwise. She did so anyway and it ended up vaporizing her.
• Door Step Baby: Percy found Severin left on his doorstop. True to form, he filmed his finding and bringing her inside, requiring several takes before he was satisfied it went perfectly. The last chapter has Severin see film footage of Penelope Edison - her birth mother - leaving her on the doorstep.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Inverted with Percy and Severin. Percy is a huge fan of fantasy works but Severin focuses on documentaries. As a child, when asked if she liked a vampire movie he made with her in mind, she bursts out crying and says that she couldn't enjoy it because it just wasn't about anything real.
• Foregone Conclusion: The story makes it clear from the start that Severin is never found.
• Friend to All Living Things: One of Severin's stepmothers kept a large number of exotic pets that were all hurt or defective in some way.
• Meaningful Name: All over the place with the names of the colonies and locations on the different planets.
• Missing Mom: While Severin had plenty of stepmothers to raise her, the identity of her birth mother was always a mystery. It was Penelope Edison.
• Never a Self-Made Woman: Invoked. Severin is aware that as the daughter of a famous filmmaker, she's already guaranteed money and fame. She doesn't want that though, and in one interview states a desire to make documentaries so great that she could say she made a name on her own merit.
• Not Blood Siblings: Severin and Erasmo, who are in a deep enough relationship that he considers himself to be her husband all but on paper, were once stepsiblings through his mother and Severin's father. Neither are terribly bothered by it, since Percy had gone through so many wives and had divorced Erasmo's mother by the time they hooked up.
• Parental Abandonment: Percy feels he did this to Severin, after he distanced himself from her following his confessing to shooting Thaddeus.

I abandoned her. It's the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand different ways. A father's only job is: do not abandon this child.

• Parental Neglect: While Percy tried to be a good father to Severin, he admits that he wasn't always there for her. Part of this is due to his being so absorbed in film making that he insists on treating even real life as a movie, having him tend to treat Severin more like an actor in one of his films than his child. Mary writes at one point that it's rather unsettling to see Severin do several takes of opening her Christmas presents and treat it as perfectly normal.
• Parental Substitute:
  • Mary Pellam was a significant mother figure in Severin's life and continued to watch out for her even after divorcing Percy.
  • Severin had hoped to be this for Anchises when she found him. Erasmo concluded his interview with Cynthia by saying that he was sure Severin had wanted to adopt Anchises with him. Erasmo himself raised Anchises after Severin vanished and in The Summation, Anchises refers to Severin, Erasmo, and his birth parents all as his parents.
• Private Detective:
  • Anchises was one for awhile, in both Percy's movie and real life. In the movie, Melancholia hires him to find out what happened to Severin, and his chapters are written as a homage to old fashioned detective films.
  • Mary Pellam is a fictional one as her most famous character, Madame Mortimer. While Anchises is based on the Hardboiled Detective trope, she seemed to be more of an armchair detective in the vein of a younger Miss Marple.
• Reality Ensues: Mary tries to treat Thaddeus's murder like it was taking place in one of her Madame Mortimer movies, locking the doors and trying to suss out clues and motives. It ends abruptly when Percy simply confesses and orders everyone to cover the crime up to avoid a scandal. Even though Mary's certain Percy didn't do it, there's nothing she can do.
• Rule of Three: Adonis is the third colony destroyed in mysterious circumstances, along with one on Mars and one on Pluto. These events are not unrelated.
• Show Within a Show: Several pop up, including a few commercials for callow milk and a soap opera, How Many Miles to Babylon?
• The Ingenue: Parodied by Mary, who writes an entire handbook based around her starting her career playing this character. Her dry wit about getting into show business that way takes all the charm and romance out of the character type.
• The Summation: A rather unusual one takes place when Anchises deduces Severin's fate, bringing together all the relevant characters including some that were dead and several that are animated.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: While Severin isn't a bad person, she lost much of her childhood warmth and sweetness, along with her close relationship to her father, after he told her he shot and killed someone. As an adult, she only is affectionate towards her boyfriend (and later Anchises) and is still angry towards Percy.
• Wicked Stepmother: Referenced by Mary in her last letter to Severin, but subverted - she was a good stepmother and even, after divorcing Percy, continues to worry about Severin's well-being. Severin's other stepmothers were also shown as being decent, if not the most attentive of parents.
• Would Hit a Girl: One of Severin's crew members attacked her on Adonis. It was to try to stop her from swimming with a callow whale.