| Pushing Ice | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 08/02/07 | 12:34 |
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page 1 of 4  Pushing Ice
Author: Alastair Reynolds Publisher: Gollancz (Orion) Out: Now Pages: 514 ISBN-13: 978 0 575 07815 0 Class: Science Fiction Niche: Hardcore / First Contact Odds are, you've already read this novel. Well, not this exact novel, but this story. If you're under 30, you probably read it at the back of a school library at lunchtime. If you're older than 30, perhaps you were lucky enough to grab a first edition before you realised what a lynchpin it was about to become. The story you already read is called Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C Clarke of course. Now it's back, retitled Pushing Ice and with someone else's name on the cover. But make no mistake: this is the tale of a lone human starship in our near future making contact with a massive and unknowable alien spacecraft, devoid of organic crew or pilots, but liberally studded with incomprehensible machines. After awhile the novel diverges into another story you already read. This one was written three times by Stephen Baxter in the Manifold trilogy, and it deals with why the galaxy isn't full of spacefaring races just like humans - the famous (or perhaps infamous) Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox is cliché to the early 21st Century reader in the same way an endless parade of alien humanoids distinguishable from humans only by prosthetic foreheads was cliché to the late 20th Century television viewer. But here it is again. Reynolds, an ex-astrophysicist with the European Space Union, already has a solid back catalogue of hardcore SF novels under his belt, and a new anthology called Galactic North. He writes big ideas, high-concept future histories, and has done much to push the neglected niche of hard-SF boldy into the afore-mentioned 21st Century, perhaps powered by femtotech-engineered semi-sentient ramscoop. Which is why it's so baffling to open the cover of Pushing Ice and jump straight back to the 1960s where life in space is "just another job" and characters are far more interested in petty internal squabbles than the mind-melting reality of alien contact. Here's the premise: the comet-mining starship Rockhopper - nuclear powered of course, like any hardware-hero of a cold war novel should be - is out peacefully mining comets, when Saturn's moon Janus lives up to its name by suddenly revealing itself to in fact be an alien construct, and accelerates out of the Solar System. |
