The Cold Light of Fate: Independent Book Review
The Cold Light of Fate (The Jovian Universe, 5)
By Kim Catanzarite
Genre: Science Fiction
Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph
An emotional, expansive story that explores the vulnerable, personal consequences of multiverse politics
With multiverse-collapsing twists and a great cast of narrators, The Cold Light of Fate showcases some truly profound humanity. Catanzarite has made an expansive story intimate and accessible.
The chapters cycle through a variety of characters’ points of view. A large part of what makes this such a compulsive read is that all of them are so incredibly different. We are consistently being served new details that we can choose to believe or not. All of these people—no matter which side they’re on—play a part in this “save the planet, protect the universe” storyline. The characters have jobs with real risk, real reward, and a high likelihood that their job is going to change.
“Nothing like visiting your parents to send you back to childhood.”
In her story, Svetlana is desperate to protect her teenage daughter Evan from the
dangers of outside universes, while Evan claims she is the prophesied savior in charge
of saving the planet from the Moon Children, an alien force trying to make Jovian
Earth unlivable.
The Jovian Queen, Caroline, is a frail human now. She is no longer able to take her true form as a six-stories tall powerful Jovian alien. Now she’s experiencing difficult emotions for what feels like the first time, while undergoing one of the most uncomfortable experiences of living in a human body: being forced to confront the fact that you’re getting old. Caroline is brought to her age humbly. Her back aches, and she finds herself getting emotional while talking to old colleagues.
The other universes don’t know Caroline’s body is failing, nor that she’s lost her Jovian power. She is in this strange situation where only the people in her bunker know she’s stuck as a frail human, and they won’t blow her cover because they need her to represent them in the escalating inter-universe conflict negotiations.
There’s a cloud of grief moving its way gently throughout this novel, making sure that the reader never forgets how heavy and haunting the impact of loss can be. The people in power may have moved on to new strategies and their enemies may have created fresh havoc, but the people whose loved ones died still live with echoes of grief in its many forms.
Because of the multiverse and time-traveling nature of the Jovian Universe series, we also feel the anxiety of not knowing whether their loved ones are alive in the other universes (and not wanting/feeling able to ask.) We feel the looming weight of characters knowing they must tell someone that their loved one has died, and we feel the inner turmoil of them constantly delaying and denying their grief because they can’t fall apart while the world needs saving.
It’s impossible not to think about themes of climate change and environmental conservation when reading Catanzarite’s divine nature writing and the fear of the coming dystopian storm. Her characters have an emotional connection to the trees, to fresh drinkable water, to breathable oxygen. The first thing Natasha, Svetlana’s granddaughter, does when she gets home to Earth is run a bath: “The water would calm her unsettled mind. It had always comforted her. When she’d lived in outer space, it was water that she missed most of all.”
We can’t help but consider the future of our planet and how, all across the globe, the things these characters love about planet Earth are already disappearing. “There is a reason you are here,” Dayana said. “I think it’s because we can’t let Earth die. Or—that sounds so big and horrible.” “No, you’re right. We cannot let it die.”
Catanzarite writes in the sweet spot of balance between pulled back, plot-driven phrasing that conveys her characters’ intense human emotion and vivid descriptive imagery for us to savor: Svetlana describes Caroline’s fragile, aging human form as “so unassuming and small-boned, perched on a stool with her back hunched like a branch made to hold up too much snow.” When Dayana smiled, “the light changed. Evan swore the surrounding plants leaned their thin branches toward her.”
This book imagines a world where the Earth’s precious resources can be honored as they should be, tackles ideas around an oppressed group fighting back against their oppressor, and depicts nations engaging in generations-long strategic battles over the rights to fertile land. I love that great sci-fi stories have a special, specific way of reflecting our lives and our culture back to us.
Catanzarite writes her characters’ disabilities in a way that feels intimately true and nuanced, making them so relatable to me as a disabled reader. This kind of understanding and perspective included in details when we read from disabled characters’ perspective is rare, and though these scenes of conversations and narration are brief, they are so memorable to me.
One area the story might have gone deeper is in its treatment of clones. It doesn’t exactly acknowledge the in-your-face exploitation of them, nor the complex ethical dilemmas it causes since they’re modeled after humans but treated as though they are machinery, sometimes almost invisible.
Of note to readers who are sensitive on the topic, The Cold Light of Fate features mass death of a specific population group by various methods. These events progress from infrequent but newsworthy attacks which communities were prepared for—to widespread, overwhelming global attacks on a scale so catastrophic that “modern society has basically ceased to exist at this point.”
Let’s just say this: don’t start reading this exhilarating book unless you’re ready to stay up through the night. Catanzarite reveals game-changing twist after game- changing twist and does it while ensuring that we’re connected emotionally to its characters. Whether you’re into sci-fi and multiverse adventures or not, The Cold Light of Fate is going to grip you. No one’s doing it like Catanzarite.
