Skip to main content

Century Rain (SF) - Alastair Reynolds *****

A recent discovery for me that dates back to 2004, this is Alastair Reynolds at his very best. It’s described in places as a space opera, and it certainly has a vast canvas - but in reality it’s a far more sophisticated novel than that pigeonhole suggests. There’s nothing I love more than a book where, after a few chapters I’m still thinking ‘What on (or more accurately off) Earth is going on?’ - and the early parts of Century Rain have this in spades.

The first few chapters alternate between a not-quite-our-Earth 1959 Paris and a future archeological expedition to Paris, which is now uninhabited, covered in ice and infested with deadly nanobots. After a while the two threads come together, but even then, for a long time it’s not clear why things are happening (in a good way).

In the 1959 Paris, a pair of private detectives are trying to solve a murder in what seems to rapidly be becoming a police state. But there is something mysterious about the dead woman they need to uncover. Meanwhile, it the future reality, there are two factions of humans: some have rejected nanotechnology after what happened to Earth, the others embraced it and have become post-human. The leader of the Paris expedition, potentially on trial for losing a young man to the nanobots, is given the option of instead undertaking a dangerous mission, travelling through a form of hyperspace link built by some ancient, unknown civilisation.

Reynolds pulls together several key ideas, all very effective SF, and weaves them into an action adventure with repeated levels of peril for the main characters that even Alistair Maclean might have found over the top - but it certainly keeps the reader turning the pages.

The book is, to be honest, too long. It’s over 500 pages of small print in my paperback and a few sections dragged a little and could have benefited from an edit down. And the key premise that explains the alternative settings is distinctly far-fetched. But that doesn’t stop it from being a brilliant book.

One interesting 'hard science in SF' aspect is that Reynolds makes use of gravity wave detection more than 10 years before it was actually done. The approach taken owes rather too much to the failed early attempts (though arguably the technique that worked in the real world couldn’t have been fitted into the narrative).

Apart from the key human characters, big parts go to Paris and, in an indirect way, the movie Casablanca: if you've not seen it or can’t remember the detail, it’s worth watching the film to pick up on a number of references in the novel. All-in-all an excellent slice of SF. 

Before I read it, I was rather pleased that it was standalone - science fiction is so oriented to series that it’s a pleasant surprise these days to get a standalone novel. But I enjoyed this sufficiently that I would have liked a sequel, particularly if it focused on Verity/Cassandra. Interesting stuff.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more