She's found her final candidate.īut in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four.

When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. New York Public Library Top 10 Book of 2021Ī Barnes & Noble Best Science Fiction Book of 2021 Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts. Being a refugee? Of course.'Cindy Kay masterfully narrates this unique audiobook, which combines a variety of genres to tell a moving story of self-acceptance and finding safety even in the bleakest of times.' - AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award review 'And this collapse, and all its attendant despair, is the Endplague.' For in that equation, there will be no forever, no eternity. 'Still, should your civilization survive, it will eventually find the same equation. 'They'll need to find the Grand Unified Theory a few more times before they can even begin to understand what 'everything' is - sorry, I didn't mean to offend your civilization.'

'I think our scientists are working on something like that too,' Shizuka said. 'But eventually, the find, and solve, the mathematical equation that explains the entire universe.' 'The civilization then rushes to probe other stars, even other galaxies it increases its research, attempting to manipulate space, time, in the hope that somewhere, someone might have found an escape, a loophole. And slowly, either through science or history, every advanced civilizations becomes aware of a disturbing possibility - that their futures may end in ruin too. 'Meanwhile, their explorers and historians find evidence of past cultures, and cultures before that. Diseases are conquered, infirmity eliminated. those that survive grow more astute, more perceptive, more advanced.

“As a civilization progresses, it goes through wars, pandemics, catastrophes.

The light from uncommon stars