Skip to main content

Elysium Fire - Alastair Reynolds *****

Reading an author for the first time is always a step in the dark, but just occasionally it becomes immediately clear that here's someone you'll have to keep reading. The last SF authors I can remember feeling this about were Adam Roberts and the late Iain M. Banks - but I am going to have to include Alastair Reynolds in this class.

One of the puffs on the back of the book describes Reynolds as a 'mastersinger of the space opera'. To be honest, I think this was a critic who had thought up a clever turn of phrase and was going to lever it in come what may - because I certainly wouldn't class this as a space opera. Okay, it's set on multiple locations in space and there are spaceships - but adventures in space aren't central to the way the book works. Instead, this is very much a detective story in futuristic science fiction setting.

Although the main character is flagged up on the cover as being Prefect Dreyfus, this is very much an ensemble piece, with half a dozen key characters taking the lead. In this future society where everything is decided by instant polling, keeping the polling mechanism sacrosanct is the job of a cross-habitat force of prefects, who are the main, but not only law-and-order component to the story. They face two intertwined problems - citizens dying unexpectedly from an overheating implant and a rabble-rouser attempting to break up the loose collaboration of habitats. Both need to be dealt with, stretching resources. But there are far more layers to the story, which Reynolds handles beautifully. It's always a page-turner with a huge amount of impetus - but at the same time these different layers are woven together with impressive skill.

If I have one criticism it's that we don't get much of a feel of personality for quite a few of the characters. They do what they do, and there might be one characteristic that comes through, but they tend not to be fully rounded. But there's rarely time to worry too much about this. The storyline also regularly has flashbacks to the mysterious childhood of two of the characters - I usually find repeated flashbacks a real drag on the flow of the narrative and dislike them intensely, but in this case they are so essential that the technique works unusually well.

Just as good as Reynolds' ability to keep the plot surging along is the innovation in his technology and world creation. Again, I haven't seen anything as comprehensively effective as Banks in this, from one of Dreyfus's colleagues who is a hyper-pig to the whiphound defensive devices used by the prefects and a whole collection of small details. What makes Banks' Culture books so special is that the whole collective of technology seems entirely natural, advanced though it is - and there's the same feeling here.

Elysium Fire is the second in a series, which is reasonably obvious from a sub-plot that ends with some unfinished business, but having come to it without reading the first title I didn't feel that I had missed out on anything. The main story here is entirely self-contained. Excellent.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  

Audio book:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...