Take Your Science Fiction Good and Hard

A few months ago I got an unex­pect­ed pack­age in the mail from my father. It con­tained a paper­back book and a note: «Thought you might like this book.» It took me a lit­tle while to get around to it, as my book-list eyes are big­ger than my book-list stomach.

My only regret about read­ing Redemp­tion Ark is that it is appar­ent­ly third in a series of Alas­tair Reynold’s nov­els with many of the same char­ac­ters and set in the same fic­tion­al future. The nov­el stood on it’s own very well, but again and again I found myself feel­ing that I was being fed a brief recap of events com­plex enough that I would­n’t under­stand what was being described with­out going back and read­ing the ear­li­er novels. 

Redemp­tion Ark is a good exam­ple of what is now being called «hard» sci­ence fic­tion. «Hard» sci-fi is sci­ence fic­tion with actu­al sci­ence in it. The sci­ence is entire­ly fic­tion­al, of course, but is con­jec­ture based on what is already known or believed. This term dis­tin­guish­es a cer­tain type of nov­el from West­erns set in space and less-plau­si­ble futur­is­tic fan­ta­sy writ­ing, much of which is valu­able, but has lit­tle focus on the sci­ence in sci­ence fiction.

The sto­ry’s greater arc is an alien inva­sion sto­ry. Appa­rant­ly the entire Rev­e­la­tion Space series of nov­els (and sev­er­al short sto­ries) relates to this inva­sion sto­ry. In it, ancient machines have been pro­grammed to search for signs of intel­li­gent life and destroy it wher­ev­er it appears. We are giv­en a brief glimpse into the pos­si­ble rea­sons for such machines to exist but only enough of a glimpse to bring up new questions.

These machines, called «Inhibitors» by one group of char­ac­ters and «Wolves» by anoth­er, have learned of the exis­tance of human­i­ty at some point three or four hun­dred years in our future (described in anoth­er of Reynolds’ nov­els) and are com­ing to get us. That’s real­ly as much as I can say with­out spoil­ing the plot.

Reynolds starts the nov­el with three sto­ry­lines, and takes a good long time to progress them to a point where it looks like they might con­verge. Adding to the con­fu­sion is the fact that the sto­ry­lines don’t take place simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. How­ev­er, once the plots start to relate to one anoth­er, the book becomes very engag­ing. Redemp­tion Ark start­ed out dif­fi­cult, but the effort was reward­ed with a com­pelling, hard-to-put-down sto­ry. The first two hun­dred pages took some time to read, but the last five hun­dred flew by in a cou­ple days.

I’m inter­est­ed in the loose ends I was left with—both those in the future and the past. Though I was tempt­ed to run out and find a copy of Rev­e­la­tion Space, the first book in the series, I end­ed up get­ting a col­lec­tion of Reynold’s short sto­ries, Galac­tic North, think­ing I’ll get a bet­ter feel for Reynolds as a writer and see more per­spec­tives in a short­er time. If, once I’m done with the col­lec­tion, I’m still as inter­est­ed in Reynolds’ uni­verse, then I’ll go back to the very begin­ning and see how it all started.