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December 25, 2005
Book Review: Pushing Ice
I just finished reading Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice (thank you, Amazon Prime). I really enjoyed Reynold's Revelation Space books, but found Century Rain a bit of a disappointment.Pushing Ice is basically a Big Dumb Object novel. Janus, one of the moons of Saturn turns out to be an alien artifact which suddenly leaves orbit and takes off for Spica at high speed. The crew of the mining ship Rockhopper (owned by one of those heartless megacorporations that apparently run everything in the mid 21st century), is dispatched to rendezvous with Janus, investigate, and get out before it vanishes for good. It won't exactly come as a surprise that things don't exactly go as planned.
The scope here is a lot smaller than that of the Revelation Space books, mostly being confined to Rockhopper's crew, but Reynolds does a fair job with the politics and personalities and generally manages to keep things moving along. There's a sort of clunky bit about the relationship of the frame story to the main story, but generally it's worth reading.
Posted by ekr at December 25, 2005 3:54 PM | Filed under:
Comments
Thanks a lot for spoiling the plot of this book for me, heh - please, in future, post spoiler alerts?
Posted by: Roland Dobbins at December 25, 2005 5:18 PM
Well, it's always tricky to review a book without giving away plot points, and I'm sensitive to having books spoiled for you, but in this particular case, I plead innocent. This is a 450 page book and everything I wrote about happens before page 80. Moreover, nearly all of it is written on the inside flap. Given that, I don't consider spoiler alerts required in this case. I believe you should still be able to enjoy the book after having read this review.
Posted by: EKR at December 25, 2005 7:10 PM