Welcome to Steve’s Novella Corner, where I dive into the less conventional depths of the indie ocean and return with strange treasures that you can read in a day or two. Here, we’ll feature the stuff we love, but are too short to feature in one of our boxes.
This month, it’s ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE by Yuval Kordov.
Yuval is an author close to my heart, and one of the most distinctively unique authors out there when it comes to style, prose, and voice. His first trilogy, Dark Legacies, blew me away with its breathless, bleak setting and intense character work. Orders of Magnitude is his first novella since releasing the final Dark Legacies book, and so I went into it with expectations that were met and then some.
Orders of Magnitude is a classic example of a simple story told exceptionally well. This is a new setting, a moon colony that has been abandoned after the actual Virgin Mary appeared to a nun there and told her to e
vacuate. The tension between science and religion is not what one might expect, for in a way that reminds me of Frank Herbert, Kordov understands that something as complex as faith is not going anywhere in humanity’s future.
That tension, rather, is in the protagonist—a Catholic warrior-monk of sorts, converted from the Jewish faith he was born into, orphaned by a nuclear strike on Israel. It’s a hell of a bold choice, and the internal narrative that drives the story forward leans deeply into it with style and decorum. It adds earthly subtext and current-day meaning to the story, granting it layers to the otherwise straightforward plot.
That plot may be simple, but it serves only as the excuse to drag our protagonist and his squad through a few circles of hell. For in the dark future that Kordov has imagined, demons both spiritual and scientific abound. I don’t want to spoil the specific temptations and illusions that mar our protagonist, except to say that Kordov paints some extremely vivid pictures.
There are moments reminiscent of Sci-Fi classics, where our protagonist leaps and bounds on foot through low gravity environments. The depictions of futuristic combat are tense and brutal. It plays between horror and action constantly, ratcheting up at a steady pace to a climax that does not disappoint but does leave the reader to wonder.
I don’t know anybody who writes stuff quite like this, and I’d recommend anybody give it a go, as it serves as a digestible example of Kordov’s work. If you like it, I highly recommend the Dark Legacies trilogy. You’ll especially love this if you’re a fan of any kind of futuristic Sci-Fi Action/Horror.
You can find Yuval Kordov on X at: @YuvalKordov
And you can find Orders of Magnitude here.
And if you aren’t already subscribed to Your Paper Quest, our indie-only book box, then you can find us (or submit your own work!) here: www.yourpaperquest.com