But always, there was an imbalance of time” (p. Some currents stretched time infinitely, and other currents not more than moments. The villagers’ underprivileged status is reinforced by the strictures of the novel’s form of space travel, called Pocket Space, “a black ocean, with currents and eddies and rapids that stretched the seconds into hours and years. There are no ways off the planet except the freighters, and nothing to do except produce dhuba. Between those visits, the villagers are left alone. The inhabitants of Fifth Village farm, harvest, process, and store dhuba seeds for their corporate masters, whose representatives arrive every fifteen years to collect the produce and deliver it to the Stations and City Planets, where it is merely one commodity among many. For a novel whose business is the back-and-forth traversal of a busy, populated galaxy with a vibrant and demanding economy, this first introduction positions us at the very bottom of that economic food chain, on the planet Umbai-V, a “Resource World” for the Umbai corporation. The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez’s remarkably assured, compelling debut, opens with what feels almost like a self-contained short story.
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