Alastair Reynolds is like a sci-fi triple threat, big “SFnal ideas”, unpredictable plot, and well developed characters, all wrapped up in very readable narrative. After reading six books by him I now feel like I can always come back to him a “reliable author” for a good reading experience. One of these days he will probably let me down badly because that always happens when I become complacent about an author but I see no sign of that so far.Pushing Ice is often cited as one of Reynolds’ best books by the PrintSF online reading community. While I have some complaints I can understand the enthusiasm. One the face of it the plot seems like a BDO themed story made popular by the likes of Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and Greg Bear’s Eon. However, Pushing Ice switches gear several times and the story is more about the characters, colonization and the last remnant of humanity’s fight for survival.Putting aside the patented Reynolds enigmatic prologue, the story takes off when Janus, one of Saturn’s moons, suddenly starts moving under its own motive power. Imagine our moon suddenly revving up and zooming away, of course we would want to give chase. In this case Janus is the moon zooming away like a spaceship, because it is in fact a spaceship in disguise. Our heroes are comet ice miners whose spaceship happen to be the nearest to Janus, so they are assigned by the Government to follow the runaway moon. Unfortunately after landing on Janus they find that it is accelerating and traveling much faster than they bargained for, they have come too far and too fast to go back home.The first half (may be 40%) of the book is similar to other BDO themed sf novels in that a mysterious alien object is found and the beings who made it are entirely absent. From the characters' viewpoint the story spans over a hundred years but in objective time many more years have passed since the discovery of the runaway moon due to the time dilation effect.Janus's arrival at a huge structure in the Spica star system launches the second phase of the story where the crew of the mining ship has to colonize the moon they just chased and landed on. They spend decades making the moon their home, during which time they meet a (very) alien race that is not responsible for creating the Janus ship. Before too long other alien races show up and all hell soon break loose.There is a hell of a lot of character development in this book, especially for the central characters. At times I think there is too much of it. There is a feud between two main characters that span almost a century. Reynolds seems to be very interested in exploring the theme of how an intense friendship can turn into the bitterest enmity. The ramifications of this feud turn out to be very serious for both humans and aliens as factions and infighting inevitably develop between the human colonists. To make matters worse some bizarre, very unpleasant and unhygienic aliens show up to exploit this very human foibles for their own ends. My gripe with the human drama aspect of the book is that there is a little too much of it, especially as the feud goes on for almost a century, well pass the point of plausibility. The two characters are essentially good people after all. However, given that I am not as interested in this feud as Reynolds wants me to be, it never actually bog down the book, which is a credit to his narrative skill. As with all the Reynolds books that I have read so far the sci-fi aspect of the book makes everything worthwhile. There are enough weird aliens, amazing super science and mind bending scenarios to keep me riveted the entire time. The climax and denouement also work perfectly. So in spite of my reservations about the surfeit of human drama in still going to rate this book at 5 stars as the good so far outweigh the bad that the latter just slide right off the scale.
This is the second Non Revelation Space universe book I've read - the first being Century Rain. I liked it more than Century Rain (Review) but not as much as the Revelation Space books.In some ways it reminds me of Absolution Gap because it involves a group of humans trying to survive in an alien environment and it was hard not make a superficial comparison between the main ship Rockhopper and Nostalgia for Infinity as far as there relegated role in both books went.The book covers mellennia with the prologue starting some 18000 years in the future before the main story kicks off in 2057. The crew of the Ice Comet miner Rockhopper are busy attaching mass drivers to a chunk of comet so they can "push" the ice when they receive a call to abandon the comet and make for the Jovian moon Janus. Janus has decided to leave Jupiter's orbit under it's own steam and head out into deep space and the Company that owns Rockhopper want the crew to get to the moon first so they can establish a proprietary claim on any data sent back to Earth. There's a very Company vs blue collar worker vibe in the beginning and for a moment it seems that this would make the major premise of the book. What we get instead is a story of human survival, alien contact, time dilation, a staple Reynold Nanotechnology, along with a very personal story about two women whose conflict with each other shapes the face of a future spanning vast expanses of time and space.I've heard it said that this book is Reynolds take on Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama - I haven't read it but a quick look at Wikipedia's plot summary and the similarities with the initial plot elements in this story are too striking to say it wasn't deliberate - but I can also see that Reynolds has pushed the envelope even further than Clarke.The thing I enjoyed about Reynold's Rev Space books was they had that dark gothic edge bordering on horror, where the bizarre was really bizarre without being cheesy. This book wasn't that nor was it trying to be. It was more a chronicle of human survival in space and often gaps decades of Janus time. I liked it well enough to keep engaged with the story but I'm really missing more of what I loved in the Revelation Space books.3.5 stars
What do You think about Pushing Ice (2006)?
It jumped around a bit too much at times; never really allowing you to get comfortable in the setting around you.I suppose that might have been the point a bit, given the story is about people making due in unfamiliar and unsettling circumstances.I'm also starting to see a trend with Reynold's writing, in that he doesn't usually give you the payoff to a situation. He builds suspense and gets you excited for what's about to happen; but then ends the chapter or section right before. He later recaps the exciting part you missed just moments before.It's a little infuriating at times.All in all though, not a terrible read.I've become an expert on what can be considered terrible science fiction; and this book in no way meets that criteria.
—Matthew Hester
In the end, there were more things I disliked about "Pushing Ice" than I liked. But there were so many neat ideas stuffed in this book, like the kitchen sink of SciFi, that I had to rate it 4 stars, even if I didn't viscerally enjoy it as much. The best aspects of "Pushing Ice" were the way that female characters took prominent leadership roles and were written similarly to male characters. This is refreshing coming from a male science fiction writer. I liked the variety of themes combined into one meshed story, including an artifact story, a generation ship story, a civilizations story, and a first contact story, among many other ideas. The aliens were diverse and interesting, with little anthropomorphism. Some aspects of the story were difficult to predict, and there's at least one main twist that's difficult to see coming from far away. The scope of the book is also much larger than most others, especially for a standalone SciFi.But as I mentioned, the negative aspects were far more numerous. I found the actions of the main characters were not very well motivated. It's as though the characters made difficult and controversial decisions because it best suited the plot rather than because it fit their characterization. Characterization was thin as well, probably due to the large jumps in time sprinkled throughout. So much of the actions of the main characters were immensely frustrating that I nearly stopped reading the book. Some anthropomorphism was evident, (view spoiler)[particularly the fact that the Spican symbols were visible in the human visible spectrum, when all the electromagnetic spectrum is realistically available. (hide spoiler)]
—Crystal
I actually read this book in a rather disjointed way -- the first two hundred pages or so in one chunk, and the last three hundred pages or so in another, more than a month later. So that might well colour my thoughts on it. Overall, I enjoyed it. Alastair Reynolds' writing is always easy to read, in my opinion, and his plots are interesting, without so much technobabble it becomes incomprehensible to me. Character-wise, though, I'm not sure I really feel for them. They're human, with human failings and human virtues, and the way they're written is believable and interesting, but I don't think any of them really made a mark on me. I also felt that the pacing was kind of off -- speeding up dramatically at some points to get to the conclusion. Several things that seem important in terms of character and world-building are just skipped entirely, and barely alluded to afterwards.Enjoyable, then, but not my favourite of Reynolds' books.
—Nikki
