C.A. Higgins
Radiate

With this novel, the very young author C.A. Higgins concludes the trilogy with which she debuted as a science fiction writer in 2015 with "Lightless" followed by "Supernova" in 2016. The third chapter is titled "Radiate" (2017) and in Italy has just been published by Urania. It must be said that the historical Italian science fiction series immediately focused heavily on this author, clearly following her success in the United States of America. However, this bet has proven to be successful. If with her first novel she could indeed be considered a beginner, today we are instead facing an author tout-court, aware of her abilities and who, in addition to her creativity and her extra-literary knowledge (she has a degree in physics and the trilogy is ideally based on the laws of thermodynamics, entropy, and what she defines as the "inevitable heat death of the universe") now shows technical skills in storytelling that have evidently progressed over this short span of time.

Curiously, this very transition from one state to another, this progression, refers precisely to the laws and those variations mentioned (clearly extrapolated as such from their proper scientific context) and makes us imagine an ideal guiding thread between the author and the story told. In this case, it is the concluding chapter of the events that feature Leontios Ivanov, the son of the legendary Connor Ivanov, the first to oppose the "system," and Matthew Gale, characters known in the previous novels and revolutionaries almost by chance because their main reason in a bloody interplanetary revolt that will cause billions of deaths, is due to the visceral bond that keeps them united among themselves and with Mallt-y-Nos, the leader of the revolt who takes her name from the legendary and bloodthirsty huntress who refused paradise to continue hunting damned souls in hell and determined to see her fight through at any cost.

We could thus speak of entropy as love, a desperate love beyond any comprehensible reason and the driving force of the forces that keep the entire universe alive. The same feeling that drives to madness one of the most developed and dangerous AIs in the history of science fiction, the spaceship Ananke, which gained self-awareness by a series of coincidences and being a quantum computer, which uses "quibits" instead of bits, i.e., particles intertwined with each other and which can merge in any possible combination, practically self-appointed to the role of avenging God or rather chasing that same love that can never be obtained, because solely the unique combination among an infinite number of possibilities.

Certainly a novel difficult to fully analyze for what its scientific implications are, as well as those concerning human nature itself. We talked about love beyond any possible reasonableness, beyond any compromise and it is true that love is a paradox, but it is also true that without that fateful encounter between two quibits then nothing happens. Perhaps this is what the same Matthew Gale means when he says that a machine is and will always remain a machine. And he is right. For the rest, as mentioned before, one can recognize the great merit of the author of having been able to improve herself and having become no less pretentious (on the contrary, the novel is entirely constructed on two distinct timelines that move in opposite directions and as such never meet, or...) but much more skillful in not losing herself in technical and hardly comprehensible language and playing this last game with open cards, evidently aware at this point of having the fateful poker of aces or perhaps making you believe it is so, but nonetheless hitting the mark and winning the hand.