Pushing Ice

I have a pet theory about good science fiction stories (and maybe fantasy ones). A good story needs to have both a wonder and a conflict element. A lot of classic SF only have the wonder one. Many of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories fit in this category. Consider 2001: A Space odyssey. Remove the wonder elements and there’s little left. I suspect even the conflict with HAL was more Stanley Kubrick than Clarke.

Sometimes pure wonder works, but often it doesn’t for commercial fiction. There it helps tremendously if there’s also a conflict aspect. Game of Thrones has an ancient evil in the north, but also the fight for the iron throne. The Expanse has the alien protovirus, but also a solar system descending into war.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is an example where pure wonder doesn’t really work, at least other than for nerds like me. (It’s nickname was once Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.) But imagine if one of the Klingon ships at the beginning had survived and made it into V’Ger, and the Enterprise had to fight them while solving the mysteries. A completely different movie! (And basically the trick used for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.)

The wonder story in Alastair Reynolds’ Pushing Ice is pretty good. A few decades in the future, humanity is all over the solar system, when one of Saturn’s moons, Janus, suddenly moves out of orbit and starts accelerating out of the system. The outer camouflage of ice starts falling away, revealing an alien machine of some type. Only one vessel, the comet miner Rockhopper, is in a position to intercept. They’re asked to accelerate and investigate Janus while it’s still reachable.

However, as they approach Janus, they get caught up in the field it’s using for its reactionless propulsion, and before they realize what’s happening, they’ve been dragged too far out to return home. They’re forced to land on Janus, and find themselves on a journey to a star named Spica, two hundred sixty light years away, where there appears to be a massive megastructure waiting. They discover that Janus is filled with alien machinery, which they’re able to use to get energy and survive. As they do so, Janus accelerates to near lightspeed, so due to time dilation, the journey to Spica only takes thirteen years for them.

Eventually they do meet aliens, who help them survive. But it gradually becomes apparent that something is off. The aliens have human technology to trade with them, technology developed after Janus left Earth, which shouldn’t be possible due to the speed of light limit. It also becomes clear that the aliens are keeping things from them. Eventually we learn what it is, and it turns out to ramp up both the wonder of the story and its bleakness. (A common trait in Reynolds’ early work.)

The conflict side of the story happens between the captain, Bella Lind, and her close friend and chief engineer, Svetlana Barseghian. On the way to Janus, Svetlana finds evidence that the company they work for may be tricking them into a suicide mission, but the company manages to cover it up. Bella is then ordered by the company to relieve her of duty. When Bella decides to land on Janus instead of trying to return home, Svetlana leads a mutiny, splitting the crew into two camps.

Svetlana succeeds in taking over, but Bella manages to ensure she has no choice but to land on Janus. This results in Svetlana exiling Bella to a remote location on Janus away from the settlement the crew establishes. Svetlana now despises Bella and wants her completely isolated. Of course, events unfold that eventually change Bella’s fortunes.

This conflict does have its moments, particularly in the final act, but throughout some of the middle sections of the book I found it a bit tedious, something that felt like a distraction from the mystery of the moon and its destination. It might have worked better if there had remained some strategic point of contention between them, something besides Svetlana’s personal enmity toward Bella. There actually does become one in the final act, which is likely why it felt more interesting.

That said, I enjoyed this book and recommend it. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading it. (It was published twenty years ago.) On his blog, Reynolds once discussed his love of Space 1999, a show I also loved as a kid. Pushing Ice seems like his take on the Space 1999 idea, of a crew on a moon isolated from Earth and forced on a journey. Although in Reynolds’ version the situation is much more scientifically coherent.

Something to consider if humans trapped in a desperate space odyssey sounds like your kind of tale.