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Bella and Svetlana have both struggled hard to break into leadership positions in DeepShaft, an interstellar mining company that pushes comets to mining platforms back near Earth. Bella is the second in command of the Rockhopper, and Sveta is one of the chief engineers. Both women are the best of friends.
While conducting an operation on the edge of the solar system, however, Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, breaks out of its orbit and quickly accelerates out towards Spica, a distant star. As the ice falls away from the small moon, observers realize that Janus is actually some kind of alien spacecraft. Due to its unusually high rate of acceleration, nobody at Earth can scramble a mission fast enough to intercept the alien structure. Only the Rockhopper stands a chance of intercepting the craft.
As if the dangers and unknowns of making first contact with an alien race were not enough, this surprise mission comes at a very difficult time for the crew. The captain, Jim Christholm, has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and command falls to Bella. A ruthless company auditor shadows Bella, seeking to undermine her authority and discredit her through playing dirty in company politics. When Sveta discovers a corporate cover-up that may cost everyone their lives, Bella has to make some difficult leadership decisions that may threaten their friendship. And when they do reach the alien structure, rifts arise among the crew, raising the chances of mutiny and even murder.
Pushing Ice is a recent novel, published in 2005. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Alastair Reynolds, both from my roommates and from friends last year in English 318. My roommate Colby said that one of Reynold’s books gave him nightmares when he was reading it out in a cabin in the woods. After reading Pushing Ice, I can definitely say that Reynolds can put together some gripping, thrilling, page turning stories.
I enjoyed Pushing Ice quite a bit, but I think that the first half was considerably better than the second half. It took me a while to figure out all the characters, but when I did, I was immediately drawn to them and their conflicts with each other. Like Crichton, Reynolds can write some truly dispicable corporate bad guys–the kind of people you just want to meet in real life and beat the crap out of them. Slimeballs.
He also writes some very interesting, complex, and believable protagonists. The thing that hooked me, that made me stay up late reading hundreds of pages at a time, was the conflict between the characters. He created some people that I really came to care about, and a disastrous character conflict that I had to see resolved.
The first half of the book is set in a rich, complex, and highly believable near-future universe. The Rockhopper was a fascinating spaceship, and the dynamics of the crew were also believable and interesting. The political situation back on Earth, the company politics of DeepShaft, and everything else all rang true. I could feel like I was actually there, and that really drew me in.
Around the middle of the second half, however, things started to break down a little. Once the aliens made their appearance and the humans started coming into contact with alien technologies, I felt that the believability started to fall apart–not because I have to have an explanation for everything, but because it felt that Reynolds started doing some handwaving. He’d throw in new alien cultures and technologies so quickly that I started to lose a handle on what was going on. I found it harder to believe that I was actually there because the “there” was changing so much.
Also, I feel that towards the very end, he started to rely too much on cheap cliches. Some of the alien cultures, especially in the last hundred pages, sounded like something out of Ascendency or Star Control II. What began as a compelling, believable story of human-alien contact became another cliche space opera where all the alien civilizations were too monolithic, too similar in terms of technological capabilities, too human-like in their underlying worldviews and interactions with each other, and too…stereotypically alien. Too shallow, not enough depth.
I don’t think this is due to a lack of skill on Reynold’s part, however–probably more a lack of time. I think he spent so much time on the first half of the book that he was rushed during the second half. He’s definitely a very powerful, very capable writer of science fiction. I would like to try out his other works–the ones that he’s better known for. And, despite my misgivings about the book, I would still recommend it to friends of mine who love good science fiction.
