Attention All Vonarburg Fans!

All those fans in the US who have been waiting for the next novel in the Tyranaël series, the wait is almost over. "A Game of Perfection" will be released in bookstores in April.





Here's what Ursula Pflug had to say about "A Game of Perfection" in her review.

Game Of Perfection
by Élisabeth Vonarburg
Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing
$20.95 Trade Paperback
339 pages
ISBN: 978-1-894063-32-6

Review by Ursula Pflug

Second in the five part Tyranaël series, which began with Dreams Of The Sea, A Game Of Perfection continues the epic saga of the planet Tyranaël or Virginia as it has been renamed. Colonists from Earth were marooned on the planet after the appearance of a strange electromagnetic phenomenon called The Sea, disabling communications. These first settlers move into beautifully described native cities, now mysteriously abandoned. Over time, successive waves of colonists, corporations and arms of government arrive from Earth to plunder the planets’ resources and meddle with the Old Settlers’ lives.

A Game Of Perfection follows Simon, an autistic boy who is changed forever by a visit to a forbidden island, where secrets of the ancients are kept behind a kind of force-shield barrier. Gradually he learns his autism is actually a survival mechanism in a world where multitudinous impressions threaten to overwhelm the sensitive. He also learns how to create psychic barriers, so that he may navigate more smoothly through his life, which, as an adult, he dedicates to finding other sensitives, training them, and setting up complicated networks of underground support for these “new children.” No one knows why they are appearing in legion numbers, largely keeping secret their paranormal powers which include telepathy, telepresencing and psychokinesis.

There’s plenty of politics, as the eventually organized (and adult) psychics aim to infiltrate and then subvert the independence party. They see the possibility of altering this party’s aims to include that of convincing the general population that not only do vast numbers of their kind exists, but that they are no threat.

Or are they?

Vonarburg doesn’t write space opera; this is largely a psychological novel. A Game Of Perfection’s intense poignancy stems from Simon and Martin’s hauntingly described loneliness, a side effect of the need to keep secrets in a covert operation, and the concomitant lack of trust between individuals who need one another most. It is also a meditation on the various forms of altruism, and lastly, or firstly, for the opening scene depicts them, it is about unicorns. Yes, unicorns.

Vonarburg dreamt the story at fifteen, and has been writing and rewriting in the thirty years since. Indeed, A Game Of Perfection reads as if we are watching a strangely beautiful, epic dream, or as if we too have opened one of the holographic memory plates of the ancients. If I have a critique it is that even the most dramatic events are something we see unfold, rather than being wrenched within as a punchier style might facilitate. However, it is also this poetic observational prose which buttresses the dreamlike quality of the series, a multi award winner in its original French.

The most obvious comparison which will come to many readers’ minds is to that perennial staple of high school English curriculums, John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. However, Vonarburg is more properly reminiscent of Ursula K. Leguin in her themes of culture, of archeology and a kind of living anthropology in which the present inhabitants of Tyranaël eventually learn so much about the ancients they begin to become them. I was also reminded of Maureen McHugh’s ability to paint with veracity the day to day struggles of human beings who need not live on an “offshore” planet for us to care about them, but do, and are more interesting because of it. What makes Vonarburg unique is her ability to make the reader feel he is exploring not a novel but a nautilus shell. Just when we think we know what’s going on, another gorgeous, mysterious chamber opens up, not displacing but augmenting the previous one.