Book Review – Pushing Ice
Author: Alastair Reynolds
Cover Artist: Chris Moore
Publisher: ACE
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: May 2006
“Pushing Ice” is a first contact adventure story concerning the crew of the comet mining spaceship, Rockhopper. When Saturn’s moon Janus mysteriously leaves its orbit to exit our solar system, the crew of the Rockhopper is tasked with interception and observation of the event. It’s soon revealed that Janus is a massive alien artifact speeding home to it’s native Spican base some 240 light years from Earth. The crew of the Rockhopper, lead by Captain Bella Lind, become castaways on Janus, but this is mostly the story of Bella’s friendship gone awry with her chief engineer, Svetlana. The two women come to lead opposing factions and both take turns as sometimes benevolent and sometimes cruel dictators. Amidst the human conflict is the tension of survial in a inhospitable alien environment with limited energy and resources.
The novel is divided into three basic parts, getting to Janus, surviving on Janus and arriving at the Spican system. Getting to Janus is a gripping adventure with a neat idea- a moon is a huge alien machine, and the routine concept of corporate greed – oops, there’s not enough fuel to get the Rockhopper back to Earth. There’s some neat ideas about mining comets here, but left unexplained is how mining comet ice is exactly profitable. How does mining comets support a huge space ship with a crew of 145 members? The middle part of the book seemed bogged down by the human conflict, infodumps and techobabble. Thirteen years pass with Bella exiled in solitary confinement, and with little progess made in understanding the Janus technology. In the final third, the pace picks up again, as the castaways arrive in the Spician system, to find they are trapped in a super massive structure, along with other intelligent life, an interglactic zoo of sorts.
As a hard SF novel, “Pushing Ice” does not break any new ground. Relativity is explored as eons pass by with the Janus castaways moving into the far flung future, and is handled rather well. The hypothetical femotech for example doesn’t suceed quite as well. A flexy is a future version of a P.D.A., but I’m still scratching my head as to what a HUD is. For this reader, the mark of a good Hard SF writer is the clarity of conveying real science, and hypothetical science in digestable form for a non-scientific audience. Mr. Reynolds at times is sucessful in the necessary clarity, but more often he is not. His previous novel, “Century Rain” was a very enjoyable alt-time travel adventure thriller with some fun ideas and likeable charactors. Here the charactors seem more roughly drawn as grey-shaded almost-heroes, or disposable and mostly interchangeable secondary charactors. As a space opera, “Pushing Ice” is successful in part, I did look forward to finding out how the novel would end, but I did feel somewhat disappointed at the conclusion. The last few action-packed chapters race long filled with the best and oddly mostly, unexplored ideas in the book. It almost feels like there’s more to the story that is untold. It just starts getting interesting, then it ends too quickly. Throughtout the tale, the social dynamics of the castaways and the civilization they build is roughly sketched in sacrifice to the dueling female leads. And why exactly do the castaways keep one or the other of these bickering women in power decade after decade? Haven’t they heard of elections?
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