Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

I’ve previously reviewed Absolution Gap by British hard SF writer Alastair Reynolds. I liked Pushing Ice much more.

This novel seems to exist outside the Revelation Space future history of which Absolution Gap forms a part. In fact, it makes something of a refreshing change from the current trend for milliennia-into-the-future “new space operas”. Which is not to say that it doesn’t involve some of that kind of thing, but the core of the novel is the crew of ice-pushing comet miners who get caught up in a First Contact situation, and their story starts relatively close to our times.

One of the moons of Saturn, Janus (the sixth moon), suddenly powers up and leaves the orbit it has been sharing with Epimetheus: it turns out to be not a 100-mile-wide lump of ice but an incredibly advanced alien space vehicle disguised as a lump of ice. This sets up the central mystery of the novel and proposes a solution to the real-life mystery of Janus’ mysterious orbit, which you can read about here.

The ensuing adventure reminds me of nothing so much as one of he favourite novels of my formative years: Arthur C Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama. In the Clarke novel, a mysterious alien artefact (a 50km-long cylynder) arrives in the solar system. It doesn’t appear to be visiting, just using the sun to provide a power-saving gravity assist on its way to somewhere else. A mission is sent from Earth to investigate, and they encounter (of course) the Technological Sublime.

Which is naturally what Pushing Ice is all about. The humans who hitch a ride on Janus are more reluctant than Clarke’s heroes, and they are riven by factional bullshit and political manoeuvring, but they still encounter the Tech Sublime and have to come to terms with some major changes to their life plans.

This is an enjoyable hard science “new space opera”, well-written and packed with ideas. My only criticism is that where the humans end up and what happens there is less interesting than some of the things they discover along the way. There’s a hint early on that Janus is programmed with some strange algorithms, but these don’t seem to be followed up. I could also have done with less of the “office politics” side of events – a little bit of that kind of thing goes a long way.

Recommended.

Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson’s 1998 novel Darwinia has been hard-to-find for a while, but is now available in this new (September 2007) edition. Strangely, I just mis-typed the author of this book as Charles Darwin. Charles Wilson is making a career habit of giving his books slightly misleading titles, and this is no exception. Although the “new continent” that appears in place of Old Europe in this novel is ironically named Darwinia by some elements of the press, it’s actually (in terms of landmass and geology) more or less the same as Europe, only with all signs of civilisation (and native flora and fauna) removed.

That’s the premise of this novel: an extraordinary event sees Europe disappear before most of the cataclysmic events of that terrible century, the 20th, have taken place, and the resulting land mass appears to be free for exploration and exploitation by the only world superpower, the USA.

That’s how it’s set up, at least, but of course events intervene and things are not quite what they seem. There are familiar RC Wilson themes here: the technological sublime, religionism, politics, oppression, and the willingness of individuals to make enormous sacrifices for a greater good that they barely understand.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as other RCW books. He’s clearly nagging away here, as in other novels, at similar ideas. (In The Chronoliths, giant monuments to a despotic leader appear from nowhere (apparently from the future); in Spin, an enormous, imposed, technological artefact cuts the Earth off from the rest of the universe; in Darwinia, a whole continent is replaced with another.) What it all adds up to is hard to say, except that individuals are insignificant in the larger scheme of things, which is always a depressing thought (even if it’s all-too-true), and that human nature is, on the whole, pretty shoddy. It is a big downer when you realise, in Darwinia, that having been presented with a whole new continent to play with, human beings immediately set about ripping it apart and stinking the place up.

Still, this is another novel of big ideas, written in RCW’s usual literary style, and like everything else of his, recommended.