Books – Pushing Ice

Well, this was the first Alastair Reynolds book I didn’t like. I think I can see what he was trying to achieve here and as JMS once said about one of the few (IMHO) terrible episodes of Babylon 5, “If you never fail, you’re not pushing the envelope hard enough.” However, the flaws I see in this book somewhat remind me of the critical reviews I wrote for Vector of a couple of Juliet McKenna’s books. In those she was giving us an inside-the-head point of view from, in the first case, a villain and, in the second case, a hero from a very different cultural mindset. In both of these cases I found that my interest in the tale was significantly though not fatally diminished by my antipathy to the viewpoint characters.

( Spoilers for Pushing Ice )

This doesn’t put me off Reynolds (I’m now onto Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days). I can see what he was trying to achieve with Pushing Ice and it’s just as spectacular as the Revelation Space material and Century Rain. Many of his other viewpoint characters, from Ilya to Scorpio to Clavain to Sylveste are pretty nasty, too. But they seem to work in their circumstances without spoiling the story for me. The two protagonists in this one, particularly the irrational torturing one, just don’t work for me.

Current Mood: convalescent

Current Music: Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Soundtrack

Originally published at blog.a-cubed.info