Change? I Laugh At Change! Pushing Ice.

The reason there's nothing Alastair Reynolds can't pull off and make you like it, I am now quite convinced, is because there is nothing within the sci-fi realm that he can't do.

A big conviction? Absolutely. But I've read everyone from Wells to Verne to Asimov to Clarke to Pohl, Heinlein, Herbert, Card, and everyone in-between, and then I caught up with the times and read everyone from Foster to Zahn to lesser contemporary players like Kevin J. Anderson; and though the old guard laid the foundations, and I'll always call Heinlein grandmaster, I must say that if there's ever been anyone like Reynolds, I haven't heard of them...which, not trying to be a putz, probably means there's never been anyone like Reynold. That's the natural and healthy order of art, though, that the students will almost always surpass the teachers, because of the wealth of knowledge and precedent those students have been given.

And now, to the book. As previously mentioned, Pushing Ice is an unashamed mash-up, but a mash-up of the best kind. Reynolds succeeds because he scorns the idea emergent in the last decade that for a story to be good, it has to be "new", and because new stories are at best very rare (I personally feel they're extinct), that's usually tallied up to lots of old stories with puerile twists, the puerile twists being what makes it "new." Also found in this approach to art is, in the desperate belief of having created something new and unique, the sad attempt to deny any and all association with the work that's come before. Reynolds, however, is new old-school: he knows the neo-classics. He loves the neo-classics. Pushing Ice, in particular, holds forth the honourable (and reliable) practice of taking existant foundations and building on them, unashamed. The result is a story that has learned from the best, and put its learning into practice not by mimicry, but by advancement...and, in that, Pushing Ice feels, in an odd yet natural way, like something new.

It's 2056 (hey! That's the same year Babylon 5 went online!), and the mainstay of the new near-Earth economy is comet mining. Bella Lind and the crew of the Rockhopper are, for the most part, your typical rough-yet-refined blue collars, proud tradesfolk who revel in their work and exude that strain of pride known to any and all who are good at what they do, and know it. Within this context, though, are not pure manual labourers, but also highly specialized scientists and engineers, along with the strain of pride unique to scientists and techies. It's really this underlying contrast and conflict - between the personality of the worker and the scientist - that forms the core of the story.

The physical plot is easy enough, and familiar (this book reminds me most of 2010: The Year We Make Contact). Satellites are picking up disturbing signals from one of Saturn's moons, which promptly breaks orbit and begins careening toward the edge of the galaxy in a very organized fashion, shedding it's moon-ly camouflage as it goes. This discovery is as alarming as it is fascinating, and every nation on Earth wants their ship to catch up to Janus first and either make contact or lay claim to it. The only ship in the vicinity is, of course, Rockhopper, which is owned and operated by a mining company (Alien! The Abyss!), making the stakes even wierder, as it's a corporate vehicle and not a national expedition. Nevertheless, get involved the government does, and it falls to Bella and her crew to decide whether or not to follow Janus (interestingly, Reynolds points out that corporations are not universally evil with the fact that no one on Rockhopper has any legal obligations to take on this mission - simply put, it's not in their contract). Fear and danger of the unknown, and the more important question of sufficient fuel reserves - this not-a-moon is moving fast - lead many to vote against, but a slim majority votes in favour, and off they go. After a few weeks, some disturbing new information on what may or may not be a fuel-related conspiracy, and the discovery that the Rockhopper's velocity readings are screwy because it's been caught in a slipstream and is being dragged by Janus to wherever Janus is headed, the need to choose whether to risk exiting the slipstream and running for home (which there may or may not be enough fuel for) or to stay in the slipstream and land on Janus, where survival is better guaranteed, leads to a mostly bloodless but very bitter (and Thing-like) mutiny. Eventually, they land on Janus (2010!), and lots of things happen very slowly that it would be irrational to attempt summarizing in this space. Suffice it to say that it is a very reasonable, claustrophobic, slightly tragic adventure with the kind of satisfying ending I've come to know and expect from the author.

The heart of the story, though, is not about what happens to the crew of the Rockhopper, but about the relationship between Bella Lind and her best friend turned worst enemy, Svetlana Barseghian, and the assorted impacts it has on the many lives of said crew and their eventual offspring. Bella and Svetlana are polar opposite personalities. Bella, the pure blue-collar, has an acute awareness that things can't always go her way, but "her way" is inconsequential in light of the well-being of her crew. She must make the hard calls, which means choosing how to decipher and use the information presented to her. She is steady, and just wants to make sure everyone gets out alive. Svetlana, on the other hand, is a hot-under-the-collar engineer obsessed with the sense of rightness she believes her knowledge and expertise have given her. That sense of rightness can also accurately be translated as narcissism. Svetlana is like Hugh Laurie's House - a brilliant mind obsessed with and consumed by its own brilliance, who refuses to understand why she can't always have what she wants, when she wants it - because, after all, she's right! Hand-in-hand with all this is an understandable obsession with power, and it is when she believes that she is right, and Bella has made the wrong call, that their friendship ruptures completely, at the cost of a mutiny and, many years later, something far worse. Where Bella is a peacemaker who will willingly cede power for the sake of the greater good, Svetlana will destroy anything in the name of her cause. Where Reynold's Chasm City was an exploration of the idea that there are (almost) no aspects to a personality that can't be changed if the individual wants it to, Pushing Ice asks us to consider what happens when people don't change. Literally, don't change - Bella and Svieta, for all their trials and experiences, remain the same people thirty years down the road, and the implications this has for the colony are severe.

Not only was I impressed by how ably Reynolds has addressed both sides of the personality argument, but in Pushing Ice, his fundamental characters are a pair of middle-aged women...and Mr. Reynolds nails the qualities of friendship and enmity that are unique to women. At no point in the book did Bella and Svieta ring hollow. Come on - that's impressive.

As usual, not even an extremely long post can get a good handle on a Reynolds book; as usual, I strongly suggest you go and read on. Yea, even this one. You'll thank me later.