Pushing Ice

Alastair Reynolds appears to be a fairly read author here based on the availability of his bibliography in the local libraries. And now looking at how many of his novels have been translated into Finnish -- it's about all of them! I thought that maybe I too should read more of his works (in addition to House of Suns) and picked off another of his standalone novels, Pushing Ice, which I read in English. I realized that Reynolds (being Welsh) writes in British English when a spacesuit's "torch" was used to light the way.

Pushing Ice starts with a textbook hook on how to make the reader intrigued. The prologue takes place far into the future where a council is deciding how to honor the person whom is to thank for the technological explosion that allowed humankind to leap to the stars.

Then the novel continues back in far nearer future and we learn that the person, Bella Lind, is the captain of a commercial spaceship, the Rockhopper, whose purpose is mining ice off comets. The ship's routine mission is interrupted when Janus, one of Saturn's moons, suddenly decides to skip town. The Rockhopper is determined to be the only craft capable of giving the undisguised faux moon chase before it accelerates out of the Solar System.

The ship and her 100 plus strong mining crew are not optimal for a scientific mission but the occasion is too important to miss: the first evidence of alien life, with more advanced technology no less. As the Rockhopper pushes pedal to the metal, a competitor appears: the Chinese have been able to cobble together their own spacecraft to catch up to Janus.

In the novel, China has been expelled from United Economic Entities (an evolution of the UN) and declared a rogue state due to their illegal venture into nanotechnology that caused a small scale grey goo incident. The Rockhopper's mission has been given an official UEE status which prohibits ships of other entities approaching it, and if necessary, allows the Rockhopper to use lethal force to prevent close contact from happening. (The ship doesn't have weapons per se but it does carry nuclear detonators for breaking down comets.)

I think such a conflict a likely scenario if a similar first contact situation were to happen in real life. Earth may not face it united, different states and entities instead pursuing their own benefit, fighting each other while doing so. The Chinese spacecraft in the novel isn't too big a plot point but it is a part of its main theme which is the divided nature of humans: a division that is found on many levels. Discord can danger even the potential longevity of a spacefaring species. With personal relationships the novel goes maybe unreasonably far with it: a decades lasting animosity between Bella and her subordinate Svetlana Barseghian. It's not unbelievable -- people do stupid things -- but it is kind of frustrating to read.

Pushing Ice was often able to give me the same feeling of a cosmic scale as Liu Cixin's momentous trilogy; this is exactly the kind of science fiction I've been looking for. Reynolds's background is apparently in physics and astronomy which at least in this novel was reflected in the hard scifi prose. On a BBC News interview back in 2007, Reynolds said he prefers writing a story over science but tries to keep presented technology as something that he personally thinks plausible. I find it amusing that the two novels of his I've read have both clearly steered past that, going pretty heavily with story first.

The biggest shortcomings of Pushing Ice in my opinion were it having alien species in close encounters. That's about every time a territory of wild imagination. Liu was so smart with his approach, never subjecting the Trisolarans to the silliness of physical observation.

I reckon the next Reynolds novel I read will be Revelation Space which kicks off a multi-book series.