| Pushing Ice | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 08/02/07 | 12:34 |
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page 2 of 4 Rockhopper gives chase, of course, and finds itself dealing not only with the vagaries of alien technology, interstellar travel, time dilation and various technical problems, but also a bitter feud between its captain and her best friend. While Rendezvous with Rama gave the reader space to wander the ancient halls of a mysterious artefact, and left all the nasty infighting to the less impressive sequels, Pushing Ice packs the entire conceptual lineup of the Rama sequence into 513 pages. There's interstellar travel, trouble with Earth, time dilation as mentioned, contact with aliens that riff very heavily on Rama's Octospiders, conflict between sentient species, and a message from the future. I mean the past. No wait the future. Hang on let me check... yes, it was the past after all. Relativity can get so confusing. The biggest problem with Pushing Ice though, isn't that it's just Rendezvous with Rama for a new century. It isn't that the whole relativistic speeds thing makes trying to parse which characters are from the past and the future almost impossible. It isn't even that the "good" aliens live in a chandelier of ephemeral beauty and the "bad" aliens live in the thing that clogs up the out pipe of your washing machine. It's that despite being an absolutely typical example of why so many people hate hardcore SF with a passion, it's one of the most satisfying hard-SF novels you'll read this year. This reviewer was actually a little heartbroken when he got to the end - he wanted more! Pushing Ice is simply testament to Reynold's skill as a "mastersinger of the space opera" (as the Times ludicrously puts it), despite not even having an original plot or bold new central concept. That's not to say the book is easy to get into, because it isn't. The prologue is set in the year 18,000, give or take, which is initially pretty alienating and also demonstrates that no matter what happens in the main plot, which opens in 2059, everything will turn out alright in the end... or so you think. After some deep-future politicking, its back to our epoch (well, the one after our current epoch actually) and into the internal politics of the mining ship Rockhopper. Reynolds immediately bombards us with half a dozen names working in just as many different departments on the ship. There's engineering, that's easy enough to grasp. But then there are the EVA suit techs, the medical team, representatives of Rockhopper's parent company, a guy with a computer built into his head, and it's twenty pages before you even realise who the hero is supposed to be. |
