Pushing Ice | ||||||||
Alastair Reynolds | ||||||||
Gollancz, 458 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Rich Horton
The novel opens with a curious prologue set 18,000 years in the future, describing an ambitious plan to celebrate the legendary
Benefactor who started humanity on the road toward expansion into the Galaxy. Then we get a flashback to 2057, and the story of
this Benefactor, a woman named Bella Lind. Bella is the captain of an ice mining spaceship, the Rockhopper.
This ship is diverted to chase a moon of Saturn, Janus, which has suddenly accelerated and headed out of the
Solar System: clearly, it's an alien artifact of some sort. Bella, however, must convince her crew to go
along: it's a highly dangerous mission, and their corporate bosses do not inspire confidence. One of Bella's key links to
the crew is her close friend, engineer Svetlana Borghesian.
Svetlana originally supports Bella, but when she later discovers that they have less fuel than they thought, and that the
corporation seems to have been hiding his fact, she begs for a turnaround, and turns against Bella when she refuses. This
sets up the central human conflict of the story, between Bella and Svetlana, who oscillate as leaders of the expedition
over time. And what about the expedition?
Eventually they reach a point of no return, and they are forced to essentially colonize Janus, while trying to unlock
its secrets. Janus is traveling towards a Structure around the star Spica, 260 light years distant, which means a long
journey is ahead of them. And in the end this journey turns out to be unimaginably longer than they can ever have expected.
Pushing Ice gives us a dramatic, though not to my mind entirely convincing, human story of the conflict between the two women
and their factions. Both have some reason for their actions, but both also do terrible things, commit tremendous
betrayals. At the same time we are given a tense story of survival in an alien environment, which I found interesting
but again not quite convincing. And finally we have a story about contact and communication with aliens, embroilment
in inscrutable alien politics, and at the end, a story of confronting truly Deep Time, the very far future. This, to
me, works best of all:
the payoff here is very effective, mysterious and awe-inspiring.
I've been known to suggest that Reynolds's novels are a bit too long, and this one is as long as his others, but I
must say that I was gripped throughout. There's a lot going on: a lot of neat SFnal ideas, some "small"
in the sense of being fairly near future technological speculation, and others "big" in the sense of dealing with
the ultimate fate of intelligent races. It's not perfect: I've already quibbled about a couple of things, and
I have to say that I could not quite believe in the main characters, even though I did manage to care for
them. But it is, well... cool, and it pushes my SF reader buttons just right.
Rich Horton is an eclectic reader in and out of the SF and fantasy genres. He's been reading SF since before the Golden Age (that is, since before he was 13). Born in Naperville, IL, he lives and works (as a Software Engineer for the proverbial Major Aerospace Company) in St. Louis area and is a regular contributor to Tangent. Stop by his website at http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton. |
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