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50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A refreshing take on a familiar theme, November 16, 2005
Pushing Ice is at its core about a fight between two close friends. The twist is that this fight takes place on a comet mining ship that is pursuing an alien artifact, the conflict between the two quickly escalates to encompass the entire crew of the ship and advanced technologies come into play as the true nature of the alien artifact is revealed. Ok, it sounds a little familiar. After the more experimental Century City, Pushing Ice is Reynold's take a crack at some of the more established themes in hard SF and does a very good job of it.
Not to say there aren't faults. Some parts of the novel, especially those dealing with the more advanced technological aspects seem pared back. Also, the novel starts slowly only to race to a finish as things get interesting. Still, at a little under 400 pages there is no dearth of material.
As with his earlier work, Pushing Ice is loaded with scienctific concepts real (relativity) and hypothetical(femtotech). What is surprising is how well this technology is integrated into the story line. Infodumps are a mainstay of hard SF and it is refreshing to see it handled so well here. Another well handled device is to have the characters and by implication the reader essentially traveling blind. There is an element of mystery and surprise present throughout the entire novel which keeps the pages turning.
For those who have enjoyed Reynolds' previous books this one will not dissapoint. For those who have not yet read his other work, this is the one to start with.
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating "Big Idea" SF, May 26, 2006
Alastair Reynolds's novels are reliably fascinating at the "big idea" level. He's got a truly first rate hard-SF imagination, and the chops to take cool ideas and reveal them via action plots, often hiding the really neat ideas convincingly until the end. He is a "light speed limit" author, and fascinated with Deep Time. And all this describes Pushing Ice quite excellently.
The novel opens with a curious prologue set 18,000 years in the future, describing an ambitious plan to celebrate the legendary Benefactor who started humanity on the road toward expansion into the Galaxy. Then we get a flashback to 2057, and the story of this Benefactor, a woman named Bella Lind. Bella is the captain of an ice mining spaceship, the Rockhopper. This ship is diverted to chase a moon of Saturn, Janus, which has suddenly accelerated and headed out of the Solar System: clearly, it's an alien artifact of some sort. Bella, however, must convince her crew to go along: it's a highly dangerous mission, and their corporate bosses do not inspire confidence. One of Bella's key links to the crew is her close friend, engineer Svetlana Borghesian.
Svetlana originally supports Bella, but when she later discovers that they have less fuel than they thought, and that the corporation seems to have been hiding his fact, she begs for a turnaround, and turns against Bella when she refuses. This sets up the central human conflict of the story, between Bella and Svetlana, who oscillate as leaders of the expedition over time. And what about the expedition? Eventually they reach a point of no return, and they are forced to essentially colonize Janus, while trying to unlock its secrets. Janus is traveling towards a Structure around the star Spica, 260 light years distant, which means a long journey is ahead of them. And in the end this journey turns out to be unimaginably longer than they can ever have expected.
Pushing Ice gives us a dramatic, though not to my mind entirely convincing, human story of the conflict between the two women and their factions. Both have some reason for their actions, but both also do terrible things, commit tremendous betrayals. At the same time we are given a tense story of survival in an alien environment, which I found interesting but again not quite convincing. And finally we have a story about contact and communication with aliens, embroilment in inscrutable alien politics, and at the end, a story of confronting truly Deep Time, the very far future. This, to me, works best of all: the payoff here is very effective, mysterious and awe-inspiring.
I've been known to suggest that Reynolds's novels are a bit too long, and this one is as long as his others, but I must say that I was gripped throughout. There's a lot going on: a lot of neat SFnal ideas, some "small" in the sense of being fairly near future technological speculation, and others "big" in the sense of dealing with the ultimate fate of intelligent races. It's not perfect: I've already quibbled about a couple of things, and I have to say that I could not quite believe in the main characters, even though I did manage to care for them. But it is, well... cool, and it pushes my SF reader buttons just right.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another fine Reynolds story, measured rather than pacy, January 26, 2006
After his hugely successful debut quartet (Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark, and Absolution Gap) Alastair Reynolds has begun widening his range. Century Rain and his latest, Pushing Ice, are set in different universes from each other, and from the shared universe of the first four books. And whereas Century Rain takes place at a time intermediate between the present and that of Revelation Space, Pushing Ice starts in the near future - 2057, to be precise. As to where it ends... well, that would be telling.
The action begins when Janus, one of Saturn's moons, mysteriously leaves orbit and accelerates towards the edge of the Solar System. The only vehicle in position to intercept its path is the nuclear-powered mining ship Rockhopper, with its crew of 145 captained by Bella Lind. At the request of Deepshaft, the owners, Bella asks the crew if they are willing to take the unknowable risks involved. Swayed by the promise of huge bonuses, a majority votes to go for it, and the chase is on. But instead of three days of high acceleration, a week of observation, and laughing all the way home to the bank, they soon find themselves fighting for their lives.
It would be wrong to give away any more of the plot, as its effectiveness rests largely on a series of surprises that go on right to the end of the book. Suffice it to say that, while slowly but steadily building up the tension and introducing us to a wide cast of characters, Reynolds weaves in some fascinating technical ideas - from an effective method of freezing dying people for future resuscitation to the potential implications of femtotech (a step beyond nanotech) and relativistic time compression. Watch out, too, for some mind-boggling aliens: in 45 years of reading SF, I have never come across anything quite like the Musk Dogs or the Fountainheads.
Other reviewers seem to have been disappointed at the obvious differences between Pushing Ice and Reynolds' first four books. It seems to me that these are the inevitable consequences of his decision to tackle a near-future scenario, along with slightly greater emphasis on characterisation and social relationships. The people of Absolution Gap, for example, are so alien to us - what with their nanotech implants and exotic lifestyles - that it is difficult to empathise with them. Hard SF writers are always being criticised for neglecting the "wetware element", but often their attempts to introduce it backfire badly. Reynolds does pretty well, I think: his people are believable, well differentiated, and easy to like or dislike. All in all, I still think he is the best SF writer active today, and this book is a worthy successor to his previous work. It certainly isn't Jane Austen, and it won't suit readers who want a brisk, action-packed, 200-page novel; but it is ideal for those of us who love to get stuck into a long, detailed SF saga.
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