| Pushing Ice | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 08/02/07 | 12:34 |
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page 4 of 4 Then there's the way Reynolds likes to introduce massive challenges and problems the characters have to solve at the moment they are about to solve them. As soon as you get your head around the way the fusion reactor running Rockhopper won't last forever, the gang comes up with a solution for how to tap power from Janus. Or perhaps a piece of machinery is declared as "impossible to fix": it's fixed in the next chapter, while we the readers remain cheated of the eureka moment. The action also jumps around a lot. Important characters die off screen. Years flit by. Little girls you never get to meet suddenly become adults and the major motivation of the chief protagonists. Heck, a key moment of the novel is when the Rockhopper lands on Janus - and we don't get to see it! Perhaps it's because of all this rather than in spite of it that Pushing Ice is such a good read. Because the central concept of tiny humans lost in a massive alien construct is so compelling, the shortcomings of the author's ability to put together the mundane framework of an actual novel become unimportant. The concepts may be familiar, but remember how much you enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama the first, second, third and nineteenth times around. After all, if you're going to rehash a plot from a book first published in 1973, choosing a book that people love to read over and over is probably a good way to take the curse off it. Don't get me wrong: Rendezvous with Rama is massively superior to Pushing Ice. The key element? In Clarke's book, the characters are amazed, awed, humbled by the alien spacecraft they are exploring. In Pushing Ice, the people on Rockhopper are so jaded their first response to being asked to investigate Janus is "how much extra are we going to get paid?" When they arrive at the alien artefact, they're in the middle of a mutiny and all they care about is how to steal energy from the errant moon. Perhaps this is a more realistic view of human nature, but do we really want to believe that when humans make first contact with an alien species, we're in the middle of a domestic squabble? Not a war. Not a grand conflict. Not even a civil disturbance. But an actual, one-on-one, who-gets-to-have-a-turn-on-the-bike-now squabble. Pushing Ice invokes the idealistic (or perhaps naive) optimism of the great space epics of yore, but flavours (or perhaps taints) the experience with a dark swirl of the ugly side of humanity. Some will find it a more complete experience than Clarke's novel, which reads rather Boys Own Adventure these days. Others will head for the bookshelf or the local library, to remind themselves how this kind of story should really be told. two and a half out of five
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