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 Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more