Advertisement

Sense of wonder, science fiction's down-market cousin of the Romantic sublime, tends to be predicated on scale. For Edmund Burke and his confrères, it was the rawness of nature, the threat of a wild storm, the horror of isolation, that was the mark of the sublime. But in science fiction, what stirs us is size, the very immensity of a vast and uncaring universe. Whether it is H.G. Wells's time traveller voyaging an unimaginable number of years into the future, or Arthur C. Clarke's spaceman whizzing through the stargate, or Greg Bear's explorers in an infinite artefact, we are constantly looking for things that are so much bigger than our puny lifespan, our short reach.

Of contemporary science fiction writers, Alastair Reynolds is probably the master of scale. He has steadily become better at the writerly virtues, such as characterisation, so that today even his secondary characters readily hold our attention and engage our sympathy. Yet even so, we see them best when set against something huge that might take our breath away. Contrary to what we might expect, they seem to be diminished if this epic sweep of time or expanse of space is taken away, as if it is their smallness that gives them particularity. So when Reynolds's stories confine themselves to a smaller canvas, a human scale, they begin to feel not so much dull (Reynolds always writes an effective adventure) as disengaged.

That was the source of my dissatisfaction with Blue Remembered Earth, the first part of Reynolds's current series about the Akinya family. The central characters are sent off around the solar system on a rather pointless paper chase that presents a series of neat but generally uninspiring vignettes of life in this near future. But it is only as the novel reaches a climax with a high-speed ship setting forth out of the solar system that the whole thing acquires any real sense of impetus. Up until that point the novel is too low key and small scale to give us the focus and vision of Reynolds at his best. The whole novel felt, in fact, like an over-extended prologue for what was to come.

A lot is riding, therefore, on this second volume in the sequence; and it delivers. We start two hundred years after the events of the first novel, and the action of On the Steel Breeze itself extends over roughly a century (the characters in this future are very long lived), so already there is a sense that this is a work on a different scale to what went before. But in a sense the timespan is the most homely part of the novel, because along the way we encounter caravans of hollowed-out asteroids each with ten million passengers, alien constructs a thousand kilometres long, curiously casual journeys that are years in length, and more. The novel teems with inventions that seem designed primarily to emphasise the smallness of humankind.

This emphasis on bigness, however, relates primarily to the background. The most extraordinary thing in the foreground is the very human character of the central figure in this drama, Chiku Akinya. Or perhaps I should say, figures. Long before the novel opens, Chiku, inspired by some sense of the dullness of life, had herself cloned twice. Then the personalities of the three Chikus were merged, so that none of them could tell which was the original, which a clone. Upon the drawing of lots, Chiku Red then set out to pursue Eunice Akinya out of the solar system, and apparently died in the attempt; Chiku Green joined one of the holoships for the journey to Crucible, the alien planet where a curious Mandala had been detected in the first novel; and Chiku Yellow lived a life of safety on Earth. But each of those states of affairs is about to change.

Yellow receives an urgent message from Green, but can interpret it only with the help of the merpeople, who, as in the first volume, operate as a sort of deus ex machina. As a result of the message, Yellow has to leave her safe home in Lisbon and set out on a journey that takes her to Venus, Phobos, the asteroid belt and back to the Akinya family home in Africa. For a while it looks as though this novel is simply going to recapitulate the hunt for plot coupons that formed the bulk of the first volume. Fortunately, Reynolds soon shifts his attention to Green aboard the holoship Zanzibar. Thereafter, our attention will, every so often, briefly flit back to events on Earth, but with no real energy. Reynolds has to periodically remind us that Yellow and, later, the revived Red, still exist, but they have no major part to play now until the very end of the book.

Aboard the holoship, however, there is more than enough plot to keep the pages turning. There's mystery, as we discover that there are massive alien devices circling Crucible that have been edited out of all the reports reaching Earth. There's menace, as a right-wing, totalitarian ideology takes over the caravan and threatens everyone aboard Zanzibar. There's peril, as we learn that there is no way to slow the holoships down, so they may all shoot straight past their intended destination, yet research that might discover a solution is both dangerous and forbidden. There's revelation, as Chiku Green discovers a previously unknown section of the holoship and the surprising stowaways hiding out there. And there's adventure, as Green and a handful of companions set out on a desperate mission to reach Crucible, only to encounter a new menace we thought had been left behind on Earth.

Reynolds keeps the stew bubbling nicely, though we must always remember that the series isn't over yet, so much of the drama only sets up further adventures in the next volume.

This is far from being the best novel Reynolds has written. It's awkwardly structured: not only is attention and action unevenly shared between the two focal characters of Chiku Green and Chiku Yellow, but there's a first-person prologue and epilogue that are entirely redundant. And because the story of the Akinya clan is far from over, there are inevitable loose ends that mean too much is left unresolved at the end of the novel. Nevertheless, it's a book that displays many of his real strengths as a writer of large-scale science fiction, particularly towards the end as Chiku Green sets out for Crucible. And there is more than enough intrigue to ensure we come back for the next volume.

Paul Kincaid is the recipient of the SFRA's Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service for 2006. His collection of essays and reviews, What it is we do when we read science fiction is published by Beccon Publications.