Eversion

For whatever reason, Eversion by Alastair Reynolds was shelved among thriller/suspense books instead of the usual scifi I'd expect the author's novels to be found at. I'd say scifi section would've been perfectly fine in this case too.

Eversion has the same story format as one of the narratives in Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky -- one that I've seen quite a few times in scifi TV shows. Even when condensed as the sole narrative like in Eversion, it still is ill-suited for a novel due to the length of the format. At first it's fine as you're intrigued by the mystery but already the first time the story starts looping, you -- or at least I -- can't wait for it to hasten to the end where everything is resolved. A TV show episode is rarely longer than an hour in total but a book will take few to finish.

'Eversion' was not a word I was familiar with beforehand: apparently it is the process of turning inside-out. In the novel it's specifically the mathematical process of sphere eversion. The translated Finnish title for the novel, Noidankehä, means vicious cycle (lit. "witch's circle").

The novel starts in the 1800s, off the coast of Norway. The protagonist is Dr. Silas Coade who's the physician on a sailing ship on a commissioned exploration mission. The ship's name is Demeter, which alone is enough to hint something's not right: the ship aboard which Bram Stoker's Dracula sailed to London had the same name. I'm sure this name choice was not by happenstance. There are no vampires aboard this one, though.

As a side note: few years back, someone got an odd idea to make a film just about the ship in Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter which came out in 2023. That seems like a rather a limited and already-told dull story but I suppose there have been movies with even smaller scopes.

As the story in Eversion loops, the location shifts and the time period skips forward yet the characters and plot stay the same. In the second loop, the Demeter is a steamship, an airship in the third etc. Dr. Coade slowly accrues an increasing awareness of the previous time periods. Helping in that is the prickly Lady Ada Cossile who seems like an out-of-place character and is eventually proven to be very much so.

Even though I figured what was going on pretty early on due to the premise being so familiar, Eversion still managed to surprise me with its end. The little twist is not a completely never-before-seen thing for this genre but I wasn't expecting it in this case -- probably because I was so certain I had figured things out already.