A haunting and harrowing exploration of loneliness, madness, family, and survival in deep space. Valentine excels at writing convincing characters -- especially ones that are deeply scarred in some way -- and then putting them in compelling, often intense situations. With Amadis Reyes she has created one of her best characters yet. Amadis is a loner, albeit a reluctant one; she's tough, but more fragile on the inside than she thinks; she has an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music but has no idea how to talk to or behave around other people. Thanks to mysterious circumstances, she finds herself stuck alone on a deep space run with a dead crew and a ship's AI she's not sure she can trust. With five long years to get through before she'll be close enough to civilization to be rescued, the question becomes not only if she'll survive, or how she'll survive, but if she'll be able to keep from going insane in the interim. ALIEN is a clear influence on this claustrophobic, spaceship-bound novella, although not in the ways such an analogy might bring to mind, as is 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but Valentine has succeeded in crafting a character-driven science-fiction piece that is all her own. It's remarkably rich in character and detail for such a short work, not to mention a pervasive sense of dread that will stay with you a long time. If you haven't read any Valentine yet, this novella is a perfect place to start.11 s Brian44

Today I finished reading Genevieve Valentine’s SF novella, Dream Houses. You may recall my mentioning that Ms. Valentine read from this work at Capclave ’14 a couple of weeks back. It’s a bit eerie reading a story someone wrote, and hearing the words in her voice … wowsers! A note: You can get Dream Houses in eBook format. Mine is an inscribed trade hardcover edition.

I really d this story. From the opening words straight through to the end, I was hooked – if it had been as long as this week’s second book, I’d be half dead from sleep deprivation. That’s one of the joys of the novella length. You can get the intensity of the short story form, and add in the missing character development that there isn’t room for 3000 words or so. Ms. Valentine has written shorts that I’ve read and enjoyed in Clarkesworld, but Dream Houses gets under the skin. It’s not a happy tale, I’ll give you that much. It seems that many of the novella length stuff I , isn’t. (See Scalzi’s The God Engines, for example.) I care about Amadis, last of the crew alive on this run to Gliese. I pondered the motivations of the ship’s AI, Capella. I still wonder how many times Capella binge-watched 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dream Houses is dark, exquisitely crafted, and deeply creepy. I’m going to have to read it again, sooner than later, to get more out of this marvelous confection. Highly Recommended.6 s DavidAuthor 18 books379

Thematically, this story had a lot in common with another book I read recently, Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes. A survivor wakes up aboard a spaceship after something terrible happened to the rest of the crew. In this case, however, Amadis is all alone, except for the creepy, unreliable AI (there was one of those in Six Wakes also). What follows is a psychic battle between Amadis and the ship's computer, which alternates between being cheerfully functional and ominously opaque, even threatening. Meanwhile, the ship is inching slowly towards the colony world of Gliese, but Amadis doesn't have enough rations to make the entire trip, forcing her to make some gruesome decisions.

I creepy horror in space novels, but as it turns out, that's not quite what this novella is. There are creepy and horrific elements, but Amadis's predicament, and the hints of something else on board with her, keep getting eclipsed by flashbacks, to her childhood, her relationship with her difficult, remote brother back on Earth, and her meeting with other crew. The weird things happening on board the ship might or might not be her imagination. Genevieve Valentine tries a little too hard to make this a psychological story, but the mental meandering replaced the initial feeling of threat and urgency. The ending sort of... limps to a conclusion.

While well written, Dream Houses did not quite connect with me. I debated between 3 and 4 stars, but I decided "d it" is more accurate than "Really d it." It's a good story, but not a great and memorable one.artificial-intelligence female-author female-protagonist ...more5 s SarahAuthor 111 books829

An SF horror locked room scenario and a lovely character meditation. For a novella with a single character on a long distance spaceship, there's a remarkable amount of world-building. Good stuff.sf4 s Redsteve1,185 20

Very well written, creepy SF novel, with suspense intensified by an unreliable (to what extent it's hard to tell) narrator, who, in turn, has to get all of her information (other than what she can actually see) from an unreliable (again, to what extent uncertain) AI that controls the ship. Elements of fear and loneliness are combined with starvation, madness, and cannibalism. Events on the ship are interspersed with flashbacks from the narrator's life, including a nonspecific dystopian (government surveillance, terrorism, resource scarcity, and persecution) childhood. This is not a shoot-em-up space opera or science heavy SF story; it is an intense quick read (novella length) and the author has an enjoyably snarky turn of phrase that surfaces periodically, in between, you know, the madness and fear. 4 stars.dystopia fiction horror ...more3 s Karl3,258 324

What's that saying "In space no one can hear you scream", If they could, It would be a really noisy place.

Here is a quote from the author "DREAM HOUSES, my first-ever novella, was first offered as a standalone book at Capclave 2014. It’s about space, survival, motets, and deer.

Or, more technically:

It takes a certain type to crew a ship that drops you seven years at a time into the Deep. Kite-class cargo ships Menkalinan get burned-out veterans, techs who've been warned off-planet, medics who weren't much good on the ground. The Gliese-D run isn't quite the end of the line, but it’s getting there. No cachet, no rewards, no future; their trading posts get Kites full of cargo that the crew never ask questions about, because if it’s headed for Gliese-D, it’s probably something nobody wanted.

A year into the Deep, Amadis Reyes wakes up. Menkalinan is sounding the alarm; something’s wrong. The rest of the crew are dead.

That’s not even what’s wrong."

In this novella about Human VS AI things turn grim rather quickly for the Humans. That made me wonder, do AI's have back stories? The rich fullness of the story and the main characters back story really take you into the events of this voyage. And reminds you how easily things can go wrong. Would you make the choices Amadis made to stay alive? I as myself that question as I ponder what I have just read.

I have just ordered Valentin's other book "THE GIRLS AT THE KINGFISHER CLUB" which is named a BEST OF THE YEAR: Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, NPR.org

Ya, she is good.

An intense Science Fiction experience worth sharing.

This is an edition of 750 (250 signed and limited / 500 trade) hardcover copies.2014-12-books-bought3 s Erin (PT)568 98

I had really high hopes for this novella; I've read the author's non-fiction work and enjoyed it greatly, hoping that would transfer to a similar of her fiction; the premise is one of my ABSOLUTE favorite to read (or see): an interstellar traveler wakes up from cryogenic sleep to find that things have gone terribly, terribly awry. And to be absolutely fair, the reasons this story was not more enjoyable for me are entirely personal. I can look at it and recognize that it's well written while also being able to say it wasn't the story for me and it didn't tell me the story I was hoping it would.

I was hoping for something more prosaic and more practical, more about the rigors of survival in space (with possible horror or thriller trappings, I'm not picky), whereas what Valentine wrote is more of a poetical character meditation that winds back and forth through time as our protagonist, Amadis, winds her way through interminable gulfs physical space. If I were more inclined to poetry or if my expectations had not been so particularly primed, I probably would've d this a lot more. It's very well written and the hints of world building we get are artfully artless in how they're embedded and revealed. Valentine knows how to suck you into a story, I just wanted more from it (or perhaps just different things) than what I got. That's certainly not Valentine's fault and I'll definitely give another work of hers a shot.novella sci-fi space-opera3 s Benjamin188 46

Dream Houses is a limited edition novella written and published for this year's Capclave, a SFF convention in Washington D.C. The story is about a woman who works as a grunt on a freighter run to a nearby star system, but wakes up early to find her crew dead and she faces a long voyage alone with only the ship's A.I for company. It's basically a tale about what happens to a person when they face madness from a long time alone. The story is well told, though it didn't feel anything that I hadn't already read before.

Rating: 7.5/10. science-fiction2 s TheBookSmugglers669 1,906

Most excellent, into the Hugo ballot it goes. science-fiction-awesomeness2 s Aneta300 50

My least favourite Valentine for sure - and I have now read all of her books! yay! - though still very interesting and of course beautifully written. Creepy, too. And weird.horror indie non-linear ...more1 Larou330 52 Read

Dream Houses is a separately published (something I have been reading a lot of recently) novella, and while it is comparatively short, Genieve Valentine manages to pack a lot into the small number of pages. The set-up is almost classical – Amadis (and I doubt the name is quite coincidental, in spite of the gender swap), our protagonist and first person narrator wakes up from cold sleep on board of the starship she is a crew member (or, more precisely, an auxiliary) to find out that everyone but her is dead and she somehow has to survive the next five years with insufficient food supplies and an AI named Capella as her only company.

That bare outline of the story might already remind you of several things, and indeed Genevieve Valentine cheerfully plunders a whole arsenal of famous Science Fiction movies: Alien (space truckers!), 2001 (possibly malicious spaceship computer!) and Dark Star (bored in space!) and probably a lot more I did not notice. She does make no attempt to hide it, either, because she does not need to: In spite of all the references, Dream Houses never feels derivative, but does very much its own thing. Part of which consists of not just describing how Amadis attempts to survive and stay sane while also attempting to figure out what exactly went wrong on board of her ship, but in also presenting the reader with long flashbacks from Amadis’ past, centered mostly around her relationship with her brother. Those parts are as bleak as the description of her struggle for survival on board of the space ship, and overall it has to be said that, in spite of occasional flashes of humour, Dream Houses is not a cheerful book by any standard, in fact it is quite depressing. This actually is in favour of the book, as it shows the emotional impact it has on the reader as well as Genevieve Valentine’s skill as a writer to keep us reading even as things become increasingly bleaker towards the unavoidable end – Dream Houses will leave you sad, but it will not leave you untouched.

This is very much a “Golden Age SF” novella – but Golden Age the way I define it, i.e. harkening back to the late 1960s / early 1970s when for SF the exploration of man’s Inner Space became at least as important as imagining bug-eyed aliens Out There – or rather, when there was a keen realization that both were pretty much the same thing, and when writers attempted to find weird new literary forms that would be able to embody all the weird new ideas buzzing around at the time. While Dream Houses is not exactly experimental in its form, it does not subscribe to a simple beginning-middle-end structure either; the flashbacks in particular stir up chronology to slowly coalesce into a picture of what happened in Amadis’ past. She is also not the most reliable of narrators (who would be, after years alone in space?) all of which makes reading Dream Houses a somewhat shifty, unsteady experience, where we can never be sure that things are quite what Amadis makes them appear. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but it seems to me that in recent years there has, after a decade or two where pretty much all published Sf (with, of course, the occasional exception) was either some TV/movie/whatever tie-in or Military SF an increasing trend back towards emphatically literary SF that is not afraid to explore and play with language and narrative structures. But whether it is part of a trend or not, Dream Houses is very recommended – especially for those who enjoy the work of authors Robert Silverberg or Barry Malzberg.1 Michael815 90

This was a haunting story, a kind of family narrative told in flashbacks during a rather tense and unconventional space voyage. I picked this up because I enjoyed Ms. Valentine's writing in "Eighty Miles An Hour All The Way to Paradise " from Robot Uprisings, and there are definite similarities - a kind of reluctant sentimentality, an indirect storytelling through flashbacks/ruminations, and an underlying premise that social connections are fundamental but fleeting.

This was 76 pages on my ereader, so I'm not sure if it is technically a novella or a novelette, but it was long enough to get slow during the middle section. Without giving any spoilers, I will say that the ending was not as satisfying as I had hoped, although it matched the tone of the book. I had a similar problem with the aforementioned "Eighty Miles..." and if this becomes a pattern, at some point I am going to have to stop passing out 5 stars willy nilly just because she captures characters so impeccably and creates environments you could drown in..._author-sex-female 2015-reading-list science-fiction ...more1 K (pronounced k)52 Read

A melancholy, lovely and horrifying meditation on loneliness, family, and artificial intelligence, set to Thomas Tallis. Valentine has a beautiful mastery of language and character, and it's used to great advantage in this short piece. Amadis awakes in the spaceship she's crewing, with everyone else dead and five years to go before next landfall - and the ship's AI may or may not be plotting against her. It's also her only friend. The ruined world she's left behind is subtly conveyed in flashbacks, as are Amadis' troubling and troubled relationships with her family, her background, and the houses of the title. Highly recommended.1 Andreas627 41

Dream Houses is a well written story about surviving in space. It has some great moments and I d the parts about music a lot. The horror slowly creeps in and by the way how Amadis reacts to her surrounding I felt a deep connection with her. The characters and the language are the greatest strengths of the novella and kept me hooked until the end.

I can't say that I fully understood what was going on and the inevitability of the events puzzled me. I wish the author had given Amadis the freedom to try out more things in the present instead of recalling so much from the past. And what is it with the dream houses? Maybe someone can enlighten me.

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. science-fiction1 Ollie26 3

I was EXPLICITLY WARNED not to finish this book at night. I did it anyway, for reasons known maybe to someone but for sure not to me. It's gorgeous and terrifying and it hurts from start to finish and I don't know why I do these things to myself, other than that in some ineffable way it feels right.

A good book.1 Kier9 2

I'm completely in love with this book!

Haunting, disquieting, beautiful.

It has that creeping, paranoid ambiguity that I absolutely love in horror, along with a kind of heartbreaking sentimentality that grounds the story even as things get weirder and weirder out in space.1 Matthew Galloway1,071 45

Extremely creepy novella set in the depths of space. Is Amadis crazy? Is the AI? Both? Plenty of shivers to go around...1 Nina {????s ??? ?????}1,014 78

This was a somewhat creepy read. It's isolation in 120 pages. It's claustrophobic. It's paranoid. But most of all, it's awash with memories that steal away sanity on a run to Gliese.

I did and did not this. It was a bit dense and fragmented, which had me scrambling a bit for more information. I got a bit confused by the gender of Amadis Reyes and thought she was a he for most part. I also got confused right up until the part where it becomes clear she's the only one alive and there's a really dead Captain Lai mummified by the AI.

There's also a creepy AI that's less creepy but more unreliable.

And there's a long way to a very sad end, a long way from her brother back home.

All I can say that this was a very interesting but strange read. Thought provoking that's for sure. sci-fi space thriller Dan474 10

Nope, not for me. It opens with a really gripping premise that I was totally into. But that storyline then has to share time with another, and eventually is subsumed by it. Maybe I would have d the other storyline better were it not for the bait and switch. The reveals at the end didn't help me tie these narratives together, which made them more frustrating than interesting.

The language here is much more Mechanique than Persona - lyric language, short sentences that are sort of non sequitur or more suggestive than explicit. That worked beautifully in the fantasy world and pastiche timeline of Mechanique, but felt lacking in this more (realistic?) sci-fi world. Almost went with 2 stars, but the reveals did still pack some emotion/surprise, so 3 seemed more fair. Ada1,915 33 Want to read

***WHO SUCKED ME IN***
Tori Morrow on YouTube in their Science Fiction in One Sitting | 8 Short Recommendations video published on 25 aug. 2020

Short stories I can read in one sitting but also science fiction that actually work in a short book?! How can I not get sucked in. Bit of a shame that I can't seem to get most of them in paperback. I actually to buy novella's even though they are a bit pricey. I don't know I'm always a bit worried that if I don't buy them in physical form, they will somehow disappear from my memory even if I enjoyed them so much. Also novella's are perfect to recommend to non-readers!social-media-sucked-me-in Vicki Kuro142 7

On paper, this is just another one of those "woke up in space too early" tales.
However, Genevieve makes it so much more than that. The horror, the flashbacks, the reality of it all makes it a story that gets to you, to your core, tugging at the most basic emotions and instincts.
It is so beautifully constructed, I had to take breaks to breathe, because I just couldn't handle how it made me feel (in the best way possible).
There's no doubt in my mind that I will read it again, just to understand it better, just to live through it again.
Forever a Valentine fan. Shannon (That's So Poe)1,078 118 Shelved as 'dnf-nfn'

DNF (Did Not Finish) @ 9%

I actually really loved the writing style in this novella! It was incredibly atmospheric and beautiful, with a slow, melancholy tone that really worked for me. However, after reading a little bit I started to see some body horror elements and realized that this was going to tend more towards grimness than I was up for, so I stopped reading it. If you can handle grim books, though, this might be an excellent one to pick up!

Content Warnings:
body horror, death, isolation Amy (Sun)883 43

Well that... was really weird. In a good way? It was a really good character-focused story but also, you know, really creepy and intense. Kinda wish I hadn't read so much of it while I was eating, haha. adult-fiction science-fiction Darvin Martin16

Oh holy shit

This was one of the darkest, most disturbing, best written, intense, atmospheric, haunting stories I've ever read. It would make a great play or movie. All I can say is wow. Lia CooperAuthor 23 books105

our protagonist awakes alone on a 6 yr long deep space haul after the rest of the crew dies; a meditation on survival. intercuts with their childhood. i was expecting whimsical from the cover, what i got was grim and haunting.


warnings for cannibalism.2020 Elaine141

Rounded up, mainly because I admit the ending made sense, but I hate when it's not particularly tidy. fiction novella science-fiction Solveig92 6

Dark. Kim Ward83 2

Stark. Beautiful. Poetic and full of intense introspection. The images swirl the Milky-way, giving us a chiaroscuro inflight and darkness. Nighteye951 52

Okown-but-read short-stories-and-novelettes RuinEleint254 19

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