Those suspended animation chambers never quite work, do they?

Alastair Reynolds “Slow Bullets” (Tachyon, 2015)

When you hear the name Alastair Reynolds, who thinks of tightly plotted novellas? A lean, mean, storytelling machine? Show of hands?  Yeah.  Me too.  I think of big doorstopper space opera.  Complex plots with lots of characters, advanced tech.  

Well Slow Bullets is a tightly plotted novella, that basically takes place in a single ship.  Rather than the expansive feelings that I expect from space opera, this enclosed story felt more claustrophobic.

Technically, this novella was great; just as I would expect from Reynolds.  But the setting & what felt like a dark grim tone set me off this basically from the beginning.  When the novella opens, our protagonist is a POW & is being tortured.  I found I just couldn’t recover tonally from that place.

So yes, well done, but just not for me.

 

Alastair Reynolds "Blue Remembered Earth" (Ace, 2012)

It’s strange to think of a story spanning the solar system to be intimate, but in many ways that’s how this felt.  Its primary focus is on a family mystery, grandchildren trying to unravel the legacy and mystery of their grandmother’s life.  There are eventually implications for the entire system, but primarily their objectives and motivations are personal.

Reynolds develops a wonderful sense of the push & pull of life.  Our protagonists, Geoffrey and Sunday, try to pull away from their family, yet are bound inextricably to it.  Similarly there is the sense that as humanity leaves the Earth to explore and to live humanity is still attracted to its home planet.

If you are looking for space battles or lots of thrilling action sequences, this is not the book you are looking for.  If you want a response to the recent plethora of future dystopias, then the world of BRE will give you a vibrant vision a future full of possibility and wonder.