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Troika was shortlisted for this year's Hugo Award for best novella, so a substantial part of the book's audience really doesn't need me to tell them about it. And yet, there are things worth noting about the book. Not least is the fact that it is a novella.

Alastair Reynolds writes big books about big things. Scale is the most consistently interesting aspect of his work. The awesome immensity of space, the long duration of time: the things that we puny, short-lived beings most want to conquer, are conquered in his novels. He speaks to that atavistic longing that turns so many of us into science fiction readers in the first place: we want to see what the universe is like, we want to know the excitement of living far into the future, of discovering what great things might be possible. If you want to encounter a big, dumb object, to explore something that by its sheer vastness and mystery takes the breath away, then the most reliable place to turn is an Alastair Reynolds novel.

But to encompass all of this, he takes a lot of space. His books tend to be slightly too long for their own good, to contain passages where pace or interest or invention slip, to drift into longeurs as the story gathers itself for the next burst. Here, in contrast, he has written a book that could have been longer.

There are two significant science fictional inventions in Troika, either of which would justify a book in its own right, together they tend to overflow this slim volume. One is the sort of big dumb object at which Reynolds excels, a technological curiosity that hangs in space like a monumental question mark. The penetration and exploration of this object provides the main science fictional drive of the story. But it is the second invention, a low key political scenario, that holds the book together and leaves you wanting more. The two become linked, but for much of the novella it is difficult to see how this might turn out.

The more overtly science fictional invention is the Matryoshka, one of the genre's more intriguing big dumb objects. It appears suddenly within the solar system and settles into an eccentric orbit about the sun, an orbit which periodically brings it back within reach of Earth. Like a Russian doll, it seems to consist of shells within shells within shells; it should be easy to penetrate, but no-one has succeeded so far. Now a three-man Russian crew is making the attempt; but already, as they approach the object, one member of the crew has gone mad, and their unmanned probe has become trapped. The drama as the two functional crew members enter a realm of unknown materials and strange energies, is well done if familiar. This sort of flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants into the heart of the mystery has been an sf staple for longer than any of us would care to remember. Here the furniture may be fresh, but the tale of derring-do in space follows the expected trajectory. What makes the novella feel fresh and engaging is that all of this excitement is merely the prelude to the real story.

The book opens with an escapee from a lunatic asylum inadequately dressed and freezing in an extreme Russian winter. As he makes his way doggedly towards the nearest town, we learn that he is the sole survivor of the crew that explored the Matryoshka. The setting is the near future, but the West has declined and Russia has reverted to a Soviet-style government, with some of those old Soviet habits like locking up inconvenient people in mental hospitals. We are meant to assume that he isn't really mad, though I remain unconvinced that he is entirely sane.

By purest chance, and it is the one glaring coincidence in the book that makes me uneasy, there is an astrophysicist living in the town who was declared an unperson by the state after making pronouncements about the Matryoshka that did not sit comfortably with the official state view. It is her that our hero is aiming for, in order to tell her that her unpopular view was really the truth. It is here, in flashback, that we learn the story of their journey into the heart of the object, and what they discovered there.

By the time the authorities catch up with the escapee and whisk him away once more, we have discovered an uncomfortable truth about the Matryoshka, one that has serious repercussions for the political system we have glimpsed in the background. The nature of this future world is deftly and lightly sketched, and is, I think, the best thing about the novella. But this attempt to link political circumstance and big dumb object is the worst. Or rather, it hints at something really interesting, but doesn't go far enough. Reynolds hasn't spent the time necessary to make the hand-waving that ties everything together at the end into something as solid and believable as his space object and his political set-up. In a real sense, the story is only beginning as we reach the last page.

For once, Alistair Reynolds has written a book that cries out to be longer.

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.