The Professor

“There’s something out there that doesn’t welcome the curious. You’re going to meet it.” The novel Gentry Lee’s “Rama II” desperately wishes it could be. Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, suddenly decides to say sayonara to the solar system and what follows ranges from two friends falling out to the rise and fall of a galaxy-spanning human empire. In this readers opinion, if you’re after a 500-page wodge of stand-alone SF this is a complete no-brainer.

In hot pursuit of Janus is the only ship in the vicinity, the Rockhopper, which ordinarily cannibilises comets. Handy, that; there’s about 150 people and rather a lot of equipment on board. Other than the flash-forward to the eventual human empire and the events involving Janus, the first 100 pages or so of “Pushing Ice” are, oh dear, engineering-heavy and focus on procedural disagreements between Captain Bella Lind and her number one/BFF Sveltana Barseghian. This, however, is worth sticking with because it has serious ramifications; some people just love to hold a grudge. Note also that while Reynolds’ ideas are huge he is, crucially, a very good story-teller. You’re never more than a few pages away from some new and toothsome development.

There are eccentricities. Would you really send a guy who has spent the last decade in a state of nervous collapse in to meet aliens? Would your next move really be to send in a cryogenically frozen corpse? Fortunately, Reynolds has enough good will in the tank for us to roll with developments like these. The start of chapter 22 recalls Gort’s first appearance in “The Day The Earth Stood Still” while building a life on a mysterious alien machine chimes with those Gentry Lee Rama spin-offs (note for Rama afficiandos/masochists: Reynolds is a far better writer than Lee). Many other small moments recall other SF tropes such that at times it feels like Reynolds is almost honouring the genre, but he never merely pastiches it. Major questions are resolved with 100 pages of the novel to go, replaced with further mysteries involving the dubious Musk Dogs and their “gristleship”, the enigmatic Fountainheads and a black cube with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man embossed on it. There’s a blockbuster finale involving a hole being punched in “the Structure” and a filmic zoom out revealing the true scale of what our heroes have been enmeshed in. It’s all delicious stuff.

I turned to “Pushing Ice” almost at random after finishing “Chasm City” but wanting another immediate, non-Revelation Space Universe, fix of Reynolds work and boy, did I luck out. Being set closer to our time I found I could zoom through this at a quicker rate, frankly impatient to gobble it down and find out how the hell it was all going to tie together. Tie together, it does and there are enough lingering questions to substantiate Reynolds’ talk of a sequel. I confess this stuff really rings my bell and non-SF addicts might give a more objective view of the likes of “Pushing Ice” but including Reynolds’ excellent Doctor Who novel “Harvest Of Time” I’ve now read four of his novels and I'm already boring everyone to death by recommending him every chance I get.