“A thrilling ride in the new era of well-written space adventure”(The Denver Post) from the author of the Revelation Space series.2057. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. But when Janus, one of Saturn’s ice moons, inexplicably leaves its natural orbit and heads out of the solar system at high speed, Bella is ordered to shadow it for … speed, Bella is ordered to shadow it for the few vital days before it falls forever out of reach.
In accepting this mission she sets her ship and her crew on a collision course with destiny—for Janus has many surprises in store, and not all of them are welcome…
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First things first: this is a hardcore science fiction novel. So it might be suicidally boring if you don’t absolutely love science and scientific-accurate fiction. Secondly, I’m very economic with my rating stars. The book has to be really, really good to get 4 stars out of me. I don’t rate books 5 stars lightly. How many perfect books you read in your life, really?
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the book that toppled Ringworld off of my 5-star pedestal for sci-fi novels. Alastair Reynolds weaves an uncannily emotional story about the perseverance of the human spirit in «Pushing Ice» with nearly perfect dialog, fast-paced action, and deep, credible characters. Sometimes I forgot I was reading fiction written by only one person, as at times it reads like actual accounts of events. It’s no Albert Camus (and thank the gods it isn’t), but sci-fi at the genre’s best.
The story spans throughout three very distinct segments. So distinct, in fact, that the author called them books. And rightfully they are, for the tale changes almost completely from one book to the other. This is a grand narrative, so it couldn’t be told in only a brief span of in-story time. I can’t tell more than that or I’ll spoil the fun of reading and finding out by yourself.
Something else got my attention: every character in here is absolutely competent in their fields. They had to be — why else that ship would’ve been sent to so important a mission, why else they’ve survived for so long before the story began? It flies in the face of Hollywood “science” fiction movies that can only manage to set off a plot through incompetent scientists doing idiotic mistakes. «Pushing Ice» is the story of the best that humanity has to offer, in all our prismatic shades, dealing with impossible odds in insurmountable situations. It’s a tale of awe, secularism, professionalism, friendship, endurance, and legacy. Alastair Reynolds uses the best of his knowledge as an astronomer. You can also feel the unmistakable aroma of Star Trek in his writing.
Hardcore sci-fi Star Trek? Hmm… maybe that’s why I liked it so much.
Well, this felt like a hodgepodge of various ideas and books that ended up with a mess. Combined with politics and power struggles between characters that didn’t feel realistic. Ending with an unfinished universe that just leaves me disappointed.
The characters and politics were somehow the most unbelievable part of this book. It has this dual power struggle thing going on between the two main female characters, whose role changes between major sections in a very unrealistic way. It keeps flip flopping between these two and it just gets annoying to flip between perspectives and be expected to believe that everything is still functioning. And that a third party didn’t get pissed off by this point and thrown them both out an airlock and remade the government in a logical way. The characters outside of the politics weren’t overly interesting, they filled roles and didn’t really have massive influence because of who they were.
The flow of the novel hurt it also, it jumps between events and years at almost random it feels like. It will glance over dozens of years of development in moments, but spend pages going into what doesn’t feel important. Major events just get solved in time skips and you don’t see how they solved or overcame the issue. At a point they even had what seemed like a major religious sect growing, but after the next time skip and leader change, they have vanished, and the characters talk in past tense about the event about how horrible it was. But what happened exactly? It never gets explained or detailed, just forgotten about completely.
The worst part for me is none of the ideas feel original. I didn’t see anything in this novel that made me think it was new or creative future tech, instead it was things I’ve seen before. It is rehashing and combining old ideas into a single book and as you read, you stop and say “Wait, isn’t this almost identical to this other novel I read the other year?”. I couldn’t point out a single idea in this book that I feel is original and will stick with me. So I come back to the hodgepodge idea, cause that is what it is, a hodgepodge of other novels just stuck together to form a novel.