How It Unfolds
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Average rating4
An astronaut’s interstellar mission is a personal journey of a thousand second chances in an exhilarating short story by James S. A. Corey, the New York Times bestselling author of The Expanse series.
Roy Court and his crew are taking the trip of a lifetime—several lifetimes in fact—duplicated and dispatched across the galaxies searching for Earthlike planets. Many possibilities for the future. Yet for Roy, no matter how many of him there are, there’s still just one painful, unchangeable past. In what world can a broken relationship be reborn? The universe is so vast, there’s always room for hope.
James S. A. Corey’s How It Unfolds is part of The Far Reaches, a collection of science-fiction stories that stretch the imagination and open the heart. They can be read or listened to in one sitting.
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6 primary books#1 in The Far Reaches
The Far Reaches is a 6-book series with 6 primary works first released in 2023 with contributions by James S. A. Corey, Veronica Roth, and Rebecca Roanhorse.
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I find the possible endless echoes this story projects gives me the feeling of swimming in dark water where the bottom has never been found.
This story steers me to consider that there may be no scenario in which a particular choice works out for me. There are times that I need to let something be in the past as what it was. Good until it wasn't. A point that deserves deliberate thought.
Gah! This was so interesting! Personally, I love to read alternative creation myths. If Prometheus (2012) was interesting to you I think you would like this piece of speculative fiction from the James S.A. Corey writing team.
The Novella follows Roy, he's a member of a planet colonization team. Well that's not entirely accurate. It's actually a copy of Roy that's a member of this team, all the members of this team are copies that are “beamed” out and “unfolded” on their target planets. His mission is to start the colonization process, and once they are able- to beam out a new copy to a new planet. Rinse and repeat.
What really makes this book cool is the non-traditional narrative. It quickly becomes unclear which Roy the narrative is following, with each new passage written from the perspective of a different Roy who made different choices in his life. I'm a fan of stories like this, and it's to the credit of Novellas as a medium, I don't think this would be a fun full-length book to read, but at just 37 attention-grabbing pages, this was short and sweet.
I mainly chose to read this because I wanted to check out a sample of James S.A. Corey's writing, so I was surprised to learn that this is part of the new The Far Reaches collection of novellas. These are a ton of cool stories by some of the best SF authors doing it right now, and they're in nice little non-intimidating chunks. I will definitely be checking out the other entries!
