Sunday, 5th of February, 2006

I’m really crap at updating the reviews section of this blog these days, and thus I haven’t reviewed Al’s wonderful latest novel, Pushing Ice. It’s the second Alastair Reynolds book I’m in the acknowledgements for now, as I read and commented on 2/3 of it before print, but suffice to say that it’s an excellent piece of hard sf that goes from near(ish)-future to far future, shares a lot of the concerns of his earlier work, but is even better-written and, by the way, has some brilliantly rendered and very alien aliens.

This, however, is something else again. As the author says in the “latest” section of his homepage, “And now for something completely different”. It’s currently only available as a chapbook (ie just one novella bound as a little booklet) published for the Novacon 35 SF convention. I got it from Cold Tonnage Books and they probably still have some copies.
I’ll explain why “something completely different” is such a great way of introducing it, but a quick warning: This is a beautiful story, and if you wish to read it by getting it from Cold Tonnage or are hoping that it’s in one of Al’s two story collections coming out later this year, then you may want to skip the rest of this review due to some slight spoilerage. Not too much, though.

First off, “completely different” might be misleading: despite the cover featuring a Bösendorfer piano floating above the surface of Mars, fantasy this ain’t. And it does share with both the jazz-soaked Paris of Century Rain and the elegiac (and highly recommended) exploration of art, meaning and identity in “Zima Blue” (another recent short story, from Issue 4 of Postscripts) a lovely mix of musical/artistic concerns with hard science fiction.

Something very strange appeared in the outer recreation bubble on the day that Katrina Solovyova died.

John Renfrew is a geologist in humanity’s colony on Mars, and when we meet him he’s just seen a piano appear in the recreation room. Solovyova seems a classic Reynolds female - Slavic name, strong but dark personality… But far from being the driving force of this narrative, she dies within two pages. Not long afterwards, we discover the significance of her death: The two of them were the last remaining survivors on the Mars colony, unable to go home or properly repair their station because of a catastrophe on earth - a runaway weaponised virus that has killed the entire population of the planet. So Renfrew is now literally the last human - and we later learn that the virus destroyed the entire biological population of the Earth.

The rest of the novella gradually turns into something like those Stephen Baxter stories that follow some strand of humanity into Deep Time; as Renfrew keeps himself sane by giving himself a purpose - nothing less than “understanding space and time”. Initially he is encouraged in this by the Piano Man, an avatar who appears at the floating piano and plays classic songs to Renfrew, and eventually interacts with him (possibly as a hallucination). Renfrew can’t remember who he is, but in case you’re wondering he’s not the “Piano Man” but rather a chap who wears weird glasses… I had to look up Rocket Man and re-remember the lyrics before I worked out why Al chose this particular guy…

But, first time round, Renfrew fails in his attempt at stoicism - he gives in to hope when a capsule lands on the surface of Mars, and upon discovering it’s just a lost probe and not more survivors, he dies on the return journey. Woken up a seeming short while later, he discovers he’s been resurrected by aliens, and here’s the “completely different”: in a delicious twist on the wolf-like Inhibitors from Reynolds’ most big space opera sequence, these aliens (”The Kind”) are machine intelligences bent on helping life-forms wherever they can find them. Too late to save humanity (and unable to reinstate life on Earth, because the virus itself is now on the brink of forming a completely new biosphere itself), they help Renfrew in any way they can. And so we follow him in a series of wondrous transformations as he continues in his quest to understand space and time.

Arthur C Clarke and Olaf Stapledon combine with some cutting-edge physics and just enough of the tropes of contemporary space opera/hard sf, and of course the musical thread that entwines itself through the plot, to make for a highly satisfying read. Unlike some widescreen short works, this piece is perfect for its length, and the musical references are mostly well-pitched (except for an egregious (but sadly commonplace) misuse of the word crescendo - hey authors, it means “a gradual increase in dynamic”, not “a climax”, ok?)
The limited edition is mostly nicely done - a very readable font, and nice grade of paper. There are a few typos - it looks like it was only given a minor edit - and a number of misplaced line breaks. I also would’ve liked perhaps a little more accompanying material (there isn’t even a bio of the author) but presumably if you seek it out you know what you’re getting. As there’s no guarantee it’ll be collected anywhere in the near future, I recommend picking it up if you’re any kind of Alastair Reynolds fan. And while you’re at it, pick up issue 4 of Postscripts for “Zima Blue” and maybe even subscribe to this very very worthy British genre periodical!

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