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Review

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Cloud Permutations

Lavie Tidhar

2010

PS Publishing






Review by Peter Young on Live Journal (12 September 2010).


I can't resist something as unusual as science fiction that's rooted in the cultures and language of the Pacific Islands – I don't believe Bislama appears anywhere else on my bookshelves. Lavie Tidhar's premise for Cloud Permutations is interesting too: on a colony world that has its cultural boundaries defined by clouds, Kal, a boy who want to fly, finds himself pulled onto a quest to find out the truth about his planet Heven and the colonists' lost history. The novel comes in three parts all of which are interesting in different ways from the set-up to the sensawunda resolution, however it's the second part that feels the weakest because it fails to aspire to being anything above and beyond a simple young-adult adventure, yet the first and third parts achieve this so admirably. Tidhar has also crammed many familiar SF tropes into this work; the end result is good but it still left me wishing he had somehow gone deeper and explored Kal's understanding of what he is discovering, something that seems to be consciously left out in order to preserve the novel's central mystery. Thematically an unusual read, but one that left me needing a little more than I was given.