Product Description

Her lover was a supernova who took worlds with him when he died, and as a new world grows within Ekhi, savage lives rage and love on a small ship in the outer reaches of space. A ship with an agenda of its own. Critically acclaimed author of weird fiction Paul Jessup sends puppets to speak and fight for their masters while a linguistic virus eats through the minds of a group of scavengers in Open Your Eyes, a surrealist space opera of haunting beauty and infinite darkness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1443761 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 152 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In Jessup's supernova-bright novella, his first stand-alone publication, pregnant space voyager Ekhi is rescued from her ailing vessel by the crew of a scavenger ship. Their captain, mysterious, doll-like cyborg Itsasu, mourns her husband's death, and has been yearning to bring him back to life with the Ortzadar engine her ship is secretly carrying. She reluctantly allows Ekhi to join her crew, but keeps her under strict supervision. The other crew members struggle with various personal issues brought sharply into perspective by a sudden alien invasion and the discovery that the ship's AI is playing a deadly game of its own. Jessup describes his surrealistic space opera vision with bleak, elegant prose and a dash of black humor. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
There are certain writers who instantly transport readers into new, unfamiliar worlds that are completely different from the universe we know. After only a few bites, the reader sits back, gasping, and reaches for the water glass. Then, eyes watering, he or she dives back in, licking the plate clean and asking for seconds. Think of Samuel R. Delany or Cordwainer Smith.

Welcome Paul Jessup to the ranks. --Analog SF, 2009

There is also a dark, other-worldly magic at work in Open Your Eyes which provides a lovely blend of fantasy and science fiction, fully exploring the possibilities inherent to the space opera sub-genre and begging readers, once again, to have faith--faith in a writer who is willing to leap past genre boundaries and show us what's waiting in the great wide world beyond. --Strange Horizons, August 24, 2009

Customer Reviews

Open Your Eyes and READ THIS!
"Cosmic" and "intense" are just two of the words that come to mind after reading Paul Jessup's Open Your Eyes. Wasting absolutely no time, the story opens with a woman named Ekhi and her lover, a star about to go supernova in the last gasp of their last union, and it goes at warp speed from there. Jessup immediately sets the scene for a story that you will not want to put down.


The style is prose that, unlike much of contemporary science fiction, is intelligent and visually dynamic. I could see the bones of the space ship, see the butterflies in the cage that made up half of Mari's face, and feel the crackling skin of the centuries old captain Itsasu. Each character has his or her own motivations for being on the scavenger ship. If Ekhi's case, she was rescued after her lover went super nova, but there was one thing none of them suspected, that the Heart of the ship had its own plans. Beware a space ship that has a mind of its own.

Darkly imaginative, this space opera grabs your attention from the sensual opening scene to the last pages where all hope seems lost. From a beating heart to the love child of a cosmic coupling, the novella is a compelling read. Reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the idea of language as a virus is more compelling and without the complicated ins and outs of Stephenson's work. It really seems more poignant that the characters don't know how or why it worked, and neither does the reader. The dread builds up as the inevitablity of infection looms over the scavenger ship's crew.

(More book reviews at http://fandomania.com)

A smooth, quick read with a few bumps
This is the first work I've read by Jessup; he's obviously a capable wordsmith. The novella has some striking written visualizations, and though the prose occasionally stumbles, overall it's an effective stylistic approach.

The main story, though odd, was compelling. This is what soft space opera should be: supernovas and alien invasions without any pseudo-scientific explication. The characters--some sympathetic, some repulsive--are mostly well-drawn. However, as with many junior (and quite a few senior) authors, the ending lacked closure. The character of Ekhi opens and closes the story, but does absolutely nothing between. It felt to me like the author had written an interesting core story, then either he or an editor had forced Ekhi around the edges in an attempt to create a motif of circularity.

4 stars. Would have been 3 1/2 were it any longer, and 4 1/2 with a more cohesive ending.

Free SF Reader
If one of Asher's Polity ships took the mutant lovechild of Robinson's Stardance and Westerfeld's Evolution's Darling down to Reynold's Chasm City for a good unsafe rogering, and then kicked the bizarre outcome back out into space, well, you might get something like Open Your Eyes.

This is somewhere in the borderland between extremely long novella and short novel. Good to get some of those again!

Call this rather bizarre spare opera a 4.25.