Pushing Ice

Pushing Ice, Alastair Reynolds' space opera that takes place in a separate universe from his Revelation Space series, is a fast read that will entertain you even if the characters and their motivations leave you scratching your head.

The story opens in the far future, with a politician representing a group of human-populated planets getting ready to state her case for celebrating thousands of years of human expansion and innovation. Her goal is to send a message out into space with the hopes of it reaching a one Bella Lind, otherwise known as the "benefactor" of humanity's good fortune.

After this initial intro, the book dives back to the mid 21st Century to tell the story of Bella Lind, captain of the Rockhopper, and her crew of comet miners. As her ship is getting ready to start hauling a comet back towards the inner system ("pushing ice"), they are diverted from their mission to intercept Janus, a moon of Saturn, that has suddenly decided to show itself as the giant alien spaceship it really is and leave the Sol system for reasons unknown.

Once Rockhopper and her crew reach Janus, the lead engineer, Svetlana Barseghian, notices some strange events happening. It seems that Rockhopper is caught in a gravitational tailwind of sorts, which is causing the ship to get sucked along as Janus increases its velocity towards the speed of light. She urges Bella to turn around and leave the effects of the strange tailwind field before its too late to make it back to Earth.

However, Bella, deciding that it was already too late to risk making it back to Earth, decides that the crew should place its fate with Janus and ride it out. So begins the major conflict of the Reynolds' novel.

The book has a lot going for it. Spaceships the size of moons, ultra-powerful and unknown alien intelligences, politics, epic timescales...basically what you hope for in a good space opera. The book does a good job of making you want to know what happens next. The technology is interesting, if sometimes a bit vague (how exactly do those forge vats work?) and I always enjoy Reynolds' obvious astronomy background shining through.

Unfortunately, I found myself -- shall we say -- less than sympathetic for the characters in the story. Reynolds has a penchant for strong female characters in his books, which I really enjoy. However, Bella and Svetlana don't hold a candle to Ilia and Anna from his Revelation Space novels. Svetlana in particular had little going for her in the character department, other than the standard strong will and uncompromising disposition that made her unlikeable to the extreme in my eyes.

Bella, while a little better, acted similarly enough to Svetlana that there was very little to differentiate the two. They both had fairly similar personalities and even talked the same, which brings me to my next beef with Pushing Ice....the dialog.

A good section of the dialog is people saying things like "I know we've had our differences, but you always treated me with respect" and "I know I can trust you, you've always been straight with me". It gets tiresome after awhile. If people talked to me like that, the last thing I would do is respect them.

However, there are the standard Reynolds diamonds hidden in the mountain of coal, such as the Dr. Axford's statement to Svetlana's boyfriend when he's getting ready to cryogenically freeze a crew member against his will (however after getting a rushed and confused signature from him) because its the only way to save his life: "It doesn't matter what he wants...I've got consent now."

Also, while the book isn't set in the Revelation Space universe, some similarities to past stories lie under the surface. We have two strong female characters at odds with each other, with one having the guiding wisdom of an incapacitated and dying male superior. The black cube that shows up later has some striking behavioral characteristics to a certain bogeyman in his previous novels.

Also, giant enigmatic tubular structures are nothing new in science fiction and arguably done better in previous novels.

Hmm...it seems I've spent a bit of time slagging off on the book, but with all that said, I had a great time reading it. In the end, I found it easy to put aside my dislike or downright apathy towards the characters (hi Parry) and enjoy the awesome imagination of one of the best new science fiction writers around.

While the human characters were a bit flat, I enjoyed the aliens that turned up later in the book. The Musk Dogs were fairly creepy and I had a perfect vision of their Gristleship in my minds eye. I was dying to know what was up with the black cube, and yeah....I think I'd like to have one of those.

All in all, I can't wait to read more Alastair Reynolds stories. I just hope he can put more work into his characters and maybe try to move away from some of his habits in portraying them.