Silently and Very Fast

I read the first few chapters of this novella as an act of faith, because Valente has earned my trust as a reader, and because Silently and Very Fast has an award and nomination list long enough to be its own short story (it won the Locus Award for Best Novella, and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards). So I waded through dense cyber-fairytale imagery on the assumption that it would resolve itself into a story. It did. A very, very good one.

It's difficult to find the beginning of Silently and Very Fast; it's one of those Ouroboros stories which loops and curls until it's eating its own tail. At some point, it becomes clear that your narrator is Elefsis, a self-aware program that lives in the consciousness of the Uoya-Agostino family in a future version of Hokkaido. Elefsis is passed down through the generations in a surgically-implanted jewel, and each human mind she lives in teaches her more about emotion, humanity, creation, and symbolic representation. When the book begins, Elefsis has just been hastily transferred to a woman named Neva — the last surviving member of the family. Neva is tense and unhappy to be saddled with the family heirloom, and she keeps secrets tucked away in their shared dreamscape. Elefsis mines their internal consciousness (the Interior), and discovers more about the world outside them and her place in it.

Please find the complete review at my book review blog, The Other Side of the Rain, by following the link below.