Radiate by C.A. Higgins

Radiate by C.A. Higgins (Italian edition)
Radiate by C.A. Higgins (Italian edition)

The novel “Radiate” by C.A. Higgins was published for the first time in 2017. It’s the third book of the Lightless trilogy and follows “Supernova“.

Ananke has only Althea Bastet, the woman she considers her mother, to keep her company but she wants to find Matthew, the man whose actions turned Ananke into an artificial sentient being. Althea tried to control her and Ananke’s reaction was to connect the woman’s biological brain to the spaceship’s systems.

Leontis “Ivan” Ivanov and Matthew “Mattie” Gale travel in the solar system in search of Constance but have to deal with a revolution that quickly fragmented after overthrowing the System. Various leaders have their sights on a single planet or a single moon and are ready to eliminate those who remain faithful to the original revolutionary ideals of the Mallt-y-Nos.

“Radiate” resumes the story where it was interrupted in “Supernova” in a trilogy that in many ways is a single great work split into three novels. For this reason, you need to have already read the previous novels and the first one in particular to fully understand the plot’s developments and the protagonists with their desires and motivations.

Again, C.A. Higgins shifts her attention to different protagonists compared to the previous novel: “Supernova” was in many ways the story of Constance Harper and Milla Ivanov, “Radiate” is above all the story of Ivan and Mattie, also in a number of flashbacks.

Ananke remains a crucial character in the plot but in this final novel she actually has little space and this is one of the problems because her choices can make all the difference for anyone she meets. That’s because she developed the ability to penetrate computers in other spaceships and easily take control of them, so I wished to see an evolution of this artificial intelligence.

The main problem in my opinion is that the story of Ivan and Mattie could simply be described as: they travel in places, meeting people. It quickly becomes repetitive and is often not even connected to important events of the revolution against the System. Soon I started having an impression of a story that got stretched with various parts in which that subplot dragged slowing down the pace.

The last part of Ivan and Mattie’s journeys is the really important one because the two men are in the midst of a series of power struggles within the revolution while Ananke’s shadow looms. The problem is that at that point I was quite bored because I found the previous parts uninteresting. A certain presence of a romantic element that didn’t interest me didn’t help.

At the end of the Lightless trilogy, I think that the story could’ve very well been told in two novels with a good pace and that the plot of the second novel was filled with extras of dubious usefulness to break it into two books. The result is that the pace has become slow especially in Ivan and Mattie’s story.

I was hoping that the doubts I had reading “Supernova” were a case of a second novel in a trilogy that suffers for the fact of having to be a bridge between the initial part and the final part of a great story, instead “Radiate” gave me even more doubts. In the last novel the various parts refer to the fundamental forces of nature with progressive unifications. The subplots get somehow put together but the ending gave me an impression of incompleteness, adding to my dissatisfaction.

The development of an artificial intelligence was the most interesting element of the Lightless trilogy but in the end it seemed really underdeveloped. This is a topic widely addressed in the field of science fiction and lately much discussed for possible real developments between interesting perspectives and fears.

Unfortunately, in Ananke’s case there’s an artificial sentient creature born essentially by chance that developed in a chaotic way, all told in a superficial way. It’s a development level that could have been OK a few decades ago, also because maybe it wouldn’t have been stretched to a trilogy, but today I find it limited.

Basically, I read “Radiate” hoping for a good ending for the Lightless trilogy but I found it rather flat. If you liked the first two novels you might as well finish the trilogy and especially if you’re interested in Ivan and Mattie’s story you might like it.

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