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Pushing Ice has echoes of Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, Tau Zero, Greg Bear's Eon and Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep -- but is wholly Alastair Reynolds work
By 2057 -- the centenenary of the Sputnik flight -- the solar system is being commercially exploited, and a steady stream of comets fuel the burgeoning new economies in near-Earth space, steered back home by huge nuclear-powered mining ships, in the same way as nineteenth century Britain was fed by its Empire. The miners call it Pushing Ice. Bella Lind and the crew of the mining ship Rockhopper are nearing the end of their current mission cycle and desperate for some much needed rest and recreation - until the startling news arrives from Saturn that Janus, one of Saturn's moons, has abruptly and inexplicably left its natural orbit and is accelerating rapidly out of the solar system. Layers of camouflage fall away, revealing that Janus was never a moon in the first place, but an alien machine of some sort. It's destination is a fuzzily glimpsed artefact in Spica, two hundred and sixty-eight light years away. Rockhopper is by far the nearest ship to Janus, and Bella Lind is ordered to approach and shadow it for a few vital days before it forever leaves the solar system. Bella's crew agree by a narrow majority to accept the mission, but the seeds of dissent are sown even at this early stage. Days later word comes that the Chinese have launched a mission of their own; then it becomes clear that the company that owns the Rockhopper is doctoring information that Bella needs if the crew are to survive the mission.... It is fascinating to see the varied influences at work in Pushing Ice. In the early pages, the narrative is bloodless enough to be remiscent of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama as the reader witnesses the downloads to Earth, the interviews with the newsfeeds and the minor politicking, but as the incidents mount, the overwhelming influences of the interstellar voyage are Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, then Greg Bear's Eon, culminating in an interstellar society whose time-dilatory effects echo those of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought in A Fire Upon The Deep. This is not to say that Pushing Ice is derivative, but that rather there are only certain limited ways that SF novels can handle mind-stretching concepts, particularly in relation to plot development. Reynolds anchors vast time scales by starting the story in the comparative present and focusing on a relatively narrow cat of main characters, primarily oscillating between ship's captain Bella Lind, and her main engineer, Svetlana Barseghian and their fiery relationship. They are both complex, multi-dimensional characters who as much as the SF tropes, make this an excellent novel.
The copyright of the article Pushing Ice in Modern American Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Pushing Ice in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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