Alastair Reynolds, Pushing Ice
Oct. 20th, 2007 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinPushing Ice is an extremely well-executed space opera that is not groundbreaking in any way, and I suspect that was exactly what Reynolds set out to write here, so I suppose he succeeded.
It starts out in a medium-term-future solar system of a 1970s or 1980s SF flavor, in which people make a living pushing comets around for mining purposes. I suspect the economics of this doesn't bear a lot of thinking about. It did seem a bit old-fashioned to me; this is a world in which people think like late 20th century Westerners and get their news by watching CNN, though there's this massive solar system expansion.
Anyway, that's just the setup. Then one of Saturn's moons turns out to really be an alien Big Dumb Object, and starts motoring out of the solar system, whereupon the comet miners end up in a race to intercept it, and end up marooned on it as it zips into interstellar space for a rendezvous with a Bigger Dumb Object. Eventually there are some First Contacts and a lot of twists and turns. If you think you've read this story several times before, it's because you have; but Reynolds mines the setup well for personal and political conflict, as power shifts between a pair of strong-willed, antagonistic female leaders who are driven by a combination of policy differences and spite.
I liked it more than most of Reynolds' work because it mostly avoids the Plague of Badass Killers that bedevils much of his writing; though it centers around a couple of scheming leaders and their personal and political squabbles, and people get killed, most of the characters aren't particularly bloody-minded. They're a different type of classic SF character, the pragmatic comet-mining engineer turned explorer in a pinch.
It starts out in a medium-term-future solar system of a 1970s or 1980s SF flavor, in which people make a living pushing comets around for mining purposes. I suspect the economics of this doesn't bear a lot of thinking about. It did seem a bit old-fashioned to me; this is a world in which people think like late 20th century Westerners and get their news by watching CNN, though there's this massive solar system expansion.
Anyway, that's just the setup. Then one of Saturn's moons turns out to really be an alien Big Dumb Object, and starts motoring out of the solar system, whereupon the comet miners end up in a race to intercept it, and end up marooned on it as it zips into interstellar space for a rendezvous with a Bigger Dumb Object. Eventually there are some First Contacts and a lot of twists and turns. If you think you've read this story several times before, it's because you have; but Reynolds mines the setup well for personal and political conflict, as power shifts between a pair of strong-willed, antagonistic female leaders who are driven by a combination of policy differences and spite.
I liked it more than most of Reynolds' work because it mostly avoids the Plague of Badass Killers that bedevils much of his writing; though it centers around a couple of scheming leaders and their personal and political squabbles, and people get killed, most of the characters aren't particularly bloody-minded. They're a different type of classic SF character, the pragmatic comet-mining engineer turned explorer in a pinch.
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Date: 2007-10-21 12:21 am (UTC)