Halcyon Years

Alastair Reynolds’ new novel, Halcyon Years, starts off as a murder mystery that takes place on an interstellar generation ship, a sealed O’Neill cylinder type environment, with cities, rivers, lakes, and forests. The ship is ruled by two rich families, the Urrys and the DelRossos, who hate each other. And while there are separate municipal governments and police forces, they’re largely corrupt and in the pocket of the families.

Yuri Gagarin is a small time private detective who is approached by a mysterious woman named Ruby Blue, an agent of the Department of Works. She asks him to investigate a couple of mysterious deaths, one in each of the major families. Ruby Blue provides the financially strapped detective with a new car and later a robot assistant. But Yuri immediately begins encountering resistance from just about everyone, the Urrys, the DelRossos, and the police.

And there are a lot of things about the situation which are strange.

If Yuri’s name seems familiar, it’s because it’s the name of the first man in space. We immediately learn that this is no coincidence, that Yuri remembers his life as the famous Soviet cosmonaut. He also remembers being awoken from the ship’s cryogenic storage of bodies and discovering his new life separate from everything he once knew. As a “Jack,” someone awoken from storage, he’s looked down on by everyone as an outsider; no one remembers his previous fame. An obvious question is how the body of a Cold War era cosmonaut, who died centuries before the ship was launched, ended up in cold storage on that ship.

Another oddity is that most of the technology used by everyone seems retro, more like the technology available to Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon than what we might suppose would exist in a generation ship several centuries in the future. Why is everyone reading physical newspapers, doing physical paperwork, using cameras with film, and using old style telephones?

We do gradually learn that things have deteriorated somewhat on the ship. There used to be lots of robots available, but they are now scarce. Although the feel of the technology is a bit too era specific to just be from that deterioration. That and it becomes obvious that everyone also dresses and acts in a way consistent with early to mid-twentieth century society.

Finally, Yuri’s only friend at the beginning of the book is a guy named Milvus, who Yuri often plays checkers with. Milvus, who seems to be homeless, is something of a conspiracy freak, convinced that the whole system is rigged. When he learns that Yuri’s investigation could take him outside of the ship, he implores Yuri to take pictures of the stars so he can compare them to the photos he already has from previous decades.

As the novel progresses, it turns into an exploration of the nature of the world the characters find themselves living in. There are numerous reveals, which I won’t spoil, except to say that they’re not lame. (As anyone who notices similarities with a certain TV show might fear.) The reveals rachet up the wonder rather than undermine it.

So I enjoyed and recommend it. It’s a bit shorter than Reynolds’ typical books, but that ended up working for this type of story.