Rosa Montero is one of the best and most humane writers alive, with an impressive body of work. By some miracle, in her sixties, she started writing science-fiction. Contrary to, say, Doris Lessing, whose science-fiction was always second rate, or Margaret Atwood, who writes some science-fiction while denying it firmly, Rosa Montero's two genre incursions are as brilliantly thought of and peerlessly executed as wholly assumed and deeply personal. In short, a triumph.
Bruna Husky, the deeply flawed and compromised, wholly feminine and intriguing humane replicant whose mortality and empathy drives both books, is an extraordinary feat of the creative imagination of an inspired author at the top of the game.
There is much to admire in this latest book, but for me proud of place goes to Labari, an awful dystopia in the sky that's fully fleshed and uncompromisingly rendered. If we're ever going to have generation starships, their political systems will be dictatorships. Maybe not so repellent as the one herein.
The second detail I deeply enjoyed was the sex. Not that there is much of it, although what exists is steamy enough. It's that after all the books by older male authors dreaming of the sensuous female bodies of their youths, from Heinlein to Vargas-Llosa, it's refreshing to find an unabashed female perspective of the attraction.
"I sometimes think that we humans are united by intangible ties, that as a species our minds brush up against each other’s, that we form a single entity capable of moving through the ether in unison, like a school of fish in the sea of time. What a pity that despite this profound and delicate harmony we are unable to stop killing each other."
Now to some ancillary reflections on the publishing of the US edition of this book.
The North American edition of this book, as of Tears in Rain before, is a work of impeccable productions values. The translation is solidly good. I didn't like the covers all that much, but they make sense. There are audiobooks, stellarly read by Mary Robinette Kowal! I mean, it could hardly get better.
This book, published in the United States in June 2016, has been totally, absolutely, shockingly ignored. Tor.com has some references pertaining Tears in Rain, but Weight of the Heart doesn't exist. Ditto for Barnes and Noble wonderful science-fiction blog. Locus Magazine: couldn't find one mention. I tried more options, but basically zip, niente, nada.
That made me wonder, until I found that this book is cursed, as it was published by an Amazon.com imprint. Amazon.com's push into becoming also publishers has its good aspects, but there's this tendency, or is it by design?, to have silos. Any book published by Amazon.com will be ignored by everybody else, as if it doesn't exist, and even Amazon.com won't actually push it much. It's a understandable but unfortunate turn of events.
In the case, it does mean that Rosa Montero's wonderful science-fiction will never have any decent shot at reaching its potential audience and will remain at the fringes. Hopefully, Amazon.com will at least persist in publishing her and in treating the material with care. That at least wouldn't be bad.
Here's to more of Bruna Husky.