Blue Remembered Earth

Blue Remembered Earth - Alastair Reynolds “Voke me active ching privilege. I need to drive your body.” Alastair Reynolds’ does John Wyndham’s “The Outward Urge” and the results are delicious. A more basic plot than usual is offset by great ideas and a hectic final 100 pages promising major consequences in the next two installments. Since consequences in an Alastair Reynolds work usually span time and space we can cut this entrée a little slack if it feels like a minor step down from some of his other mind-blowers.

The plot concerns the activities of elephant-whisperer Geoffrey and his moon-based artist sister Sunday of the Akinya family who are coerced by their far more business-y cousins into resolving some dangling threads after their indomitable grandmother Eunice passes away. As Sunday explains half-way through: “On the Moon my brother found something in a safe-deposit box. That led us to Pythagoras. What we found in Pythagoras led me to Phobos. Phobos led me to the Evolvarium….” and so on. That safe-deposit box is certainly the hook that reeled in this reader. That, along with super-telescopes, Iceteroids, alien mandalas and the transhuman mer-people of the United Aquatic Nations. “Aquaman” will have to go some to top Reynolds’ depiction of an undersea civilisation. The only problem with Reynolds’ setting up a scavenger hunt through his toothsome world to some Big Secret is that in his rational-as-far-as-possible strait-jacket the number of Big Secrets to chase after aren’t that many and this reader kinda guessed where it was all heading fairly early on. The ride, however, and the world it takes place in is very much worth it.

There’s always a lot of back story in Reynolds’ novels that suggest whole other narratives. Possible candidates for his next short story collection might include grand dame Eunice and the trusty Memphis setting up operations on the Iceteroid “Lionheart”, for one thing. Then there’s the genesis of the Martian “Evolvarium” and what it might lead to for another. I presume elements such as the Mandala and Eunice’s final fate might be explored in further volumes and I’m sure future characters might in passing cite the Panspermian Initiative as their religion. While there is deceit and betrayal the world of this novel is surprisingly optimistic – little crime, for instance – but never naïve. Geoffrey’s sociopathic cousins and business partners (one has an “empathy shunt” installed to allow him to be a better businessman) get a pleasingly mature fate, and What Happened To Memphis turns out not to be some dastardly plan. Our guides in this world are rich types but Reynolds’ is careful to make them the outcasts of the family and thus more relatable.

“Blue Remembered Earth” also has some interesting things to say about surveillance. The Mechanism is clearly some sort of Deep Thought supercomputer wirelessly linked via the “aug” to nanomachines compulsorily introduced into the blood stream. Great for augmented reality infomatics and the like but it steps in to police violence too. Hence, when Geoffrey tries to punch one of his odious cousins he immediately gets a crippling headache. So no crime, no murder…except on the peripheries of the aug and in the militantly “descrutinized zone” on the moon. It is exactly this sort of careful thinking and world-building that gets we Reynolds fanboys excited. It’s all ju-u-st possible.

I was a bit cheeky in picking this as my next Reynolds read, having yet to finish his "Revelation Space" saga but I read reactively and wanted something very different after Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84”. It’s difficult to rate his novels as there is a consistency of quality and prose, the man just delivers again and again. He is Arthur C. Clarke (the Phobos Monolith is suggested to be a “sentinel” at one point) by way of Iain M. Banks. I’m catching up with his back catalogue but I can’t wait to see what he does over the next ten to twenty years. I find it difficult to believe newbies or anyone familiar with Reynolds’ work would find “Blue Remembered Earth” a disappointment but then again “For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid.”