Spectrum SF summary, 2001
The novella is Alastair Reynolds' "Glacial", a sequel to his earlier Spectrum SF story "Great Wall of Mars", and with that story part of his common future history which he also uses in his novels Revelation Space and Chasm City. "Glacial" is from a viewpoint allied to the "Conjoiners", who have created a sort of human hive mind technologically, and it is very sympathetic to that viewpoint, unusual for "hive mind" stories. It's also a neat SFnal mystery -- a fine story all around.
Locus, April 2002
The latest array of original novellas from Peter Crowther’s PS imprint is rather impressive. Diamond Dogs, a sidebar to Alastair Reynolds’s ongoing future history sequence—in particular, to the events in Revelation Space (2000)—is a Gothic-mathematical fable of high allusive verve. From Chasm City, the Athens of the planet Yellowstone and the entire human universe, a group of ill-assorted adventurers sets out to probe yet another of the sinister alien artifacts that dot their galactic environs. On a barren world, they must penetrate an inscrutable levitating tower, which poses them a succession of ever more treacherous logical puzzles as they advance through its chambers, and punishes excruciatingly any misstep. The humans are at obvious and subtle cross-purposes; their very physical natures must alter to keep up with the challenges they face; and, prior to a denouement of deep Gothic dye, their every weakness is exposed and exploited. Rather like the resonantly lugubrious space operas George R. R. Martin produced in the Seventies, but even gloomier, Diamond Dogs suggests that we are rats in the cosmic maze, our aspirations masks for base desires, our behaviors puffed-up Pavlovian reflexes. But there is humor in the gore, slapstick in the pratfalls; at least we get to laugh at ourselves as we tread the testing passageways…
Locus, November 2002
By and large Peter Crowther's Mars Probes is an impressive original anthology. It stands head and shoulders, at any rate, above the run of mass market paperback anthologies we see these days. I really enjoyed Paul Di Filippo's "A Martian Theodicy", a hilarious revisionist take on the classic Stanley Weinbaum story; and Alastair Reynolds' "The Real Story", in which a journalist finds the crew of the original manned expedition to Mars and finds some rather different views on both "what really happened", and on what has happened to Mars since then.
Review of Constellations (Locus, March 2005)
Another of the standouts is Alastair Reynolds's "Beyond the Aquila Rift", closer to a traditional SF space story, with an unexpected and spooky twist. A starship captain finds himself marooned in a very distant star system due to a mishap navigating what seems to be a wormhole network. There is no way to get home in a human lifetime, so it is perhaps fortunate that he encounters an old lover also stuck in this system. But his efforts to revive a crewmate lead him to a disturbing new revelation.
Locus, November 2005
The cover story for the Summer issue of Postscripts is “Zima Blue”, by Alastair Reynolds, a future art story that actually works. The narrator is a reporter covering the unveiling of the last and greatest – or so it is advertised – piece of art by Zima, a sort of Christo-like character, famous for increasingly huge pieces – wrapping moons and suchlike – mostly consisting of the single color now dubbed “Zima Blue”. The reporter is privileged to learn Zima’s back story, which is surprising and in the end quite moving – and which actually convincingly explains his art.
Locus, April 2006
More spectacular in scale is Alastair Reynolds’s “Thousandth Night”, about the periodic Reunion of a group of altered clones who spend 200,000 years traveling the Galaxy then come together to share their experiences. The conflict here is a mystery concerning one of their number who has evidently fabricated some experiences, leading the protagonist and his lover to suspect something nefarious, perhaps concerning the obscure Great Work that certain cultures are proposing. The nature of the Great Work is indeed fairly interesting, and the crime revealed is pretty dastardly.
Review of Galactic Empires (Locus, June 2006)
Alastair Reynolds’s “The Six Directions of Space” is set in an alternate history where the Mongol Empire rules the world, and much of the galaxy – but they learn that space is leaky, and accidental travel into parallel universes is possible. Two somewhat damaged people from quite different universes find themselves looking for something like a haven, or perhaps even peace.
Review of Forbidden Planets (Locus, October 2006)
Another offbeat version of the story is Alastair Reynolds’s “Tiger, Burning”, which considers the idea of multiple parallel universes in “branes”, each slightly different. Humans have explored across many of these until the differences become dangerous. An investigator with the interesting name Fernando visits a very distant brane featuring a character named Meranda, whose husband just died in what may have been an accident. Reynolds plays with the idea of echoes of stories transmitting information across the branes, so that both The Tempest and Forbidden Planet are really about this current situation – the story never really convinces, but it is interesting.
Review of Eclipse Two (Locus, November 2008)
Alastair Reynolds’s “Fury” shares tropes with both Scholes’s story – a near-immortal Emperor – and Baxter’s – sibling rivalry with effects extending very far to the future – as an Interstellar Emperor’s bodyguard investigates an attempt on his ruler’s life. Here I felt that the familiar tropes were in the end a bit too familiar, though the story remains enjoyable.
Review of Solaris 3 (Locus, May 2009)
So Alastair Reynolds’s “The Fixation” two parallel universes are shown, each different from ours, partly because of the different history of the Antikythera Mechanism, an early device that may have been a mechanical computer – the story centers on women in each universe who are working in very different ways on restoring the Mechanism, and the spooky way their efforts overlap.
Review of Life on Mars (Locus, May 2011)
A couple of stories feature plucky kids getting in trouble by impulsive acts, a traditional YA theme. “The Old Man and the Martian Sea”, by Alastair Reynolds, concerns a girl who misses her older sister, and who ends up stowing away on a delivery balloon, and ending up on a remote and obsolete “Scaper”, on which an old man has spent his last years, and has a story he wants someone to remember.
Locus, March 2017
One of the better novellas of the year showed up in December: The Iron Tactician, by Alastair Reynolds. This is another of his stories about Merlin, who is engaged in a long search for a weapon to use against the Berserker-like Huskers, who seem determined to exterminate humanity. He comes across a swallowship destroyed by the Huskers, with one survivor, Teal, who leads him eventually to a war-torn system where he can hope to find a syrinx to replace his damaged one. It turns out Teal has an interesting history in that system – more interesting than even she knows. And the story really turns on that system’s history, and on the title entity, an AI used to prosecute the ongoing war between two factions. The Iron Tactician has been stolen by a third agent – pirates who may really want to end the ware entirely. The resolution is moving and effective, as we learn what or who the Iron Tactician really is.
Review of Infinite Stars (Locus, October 2017)
And the best of all the new stories is Alastair Reynolds’ “Night Passage”, a dark story about what goes wrong when a spaceship carrying both the hivemind-like Conjoiners and the more conventionally “human” Demarchists breaks down in mid-journey to the planet Yellowstone, coincidentally close to a significant alien artefact. The Conjoiners are suspected of sabotage or mutiny, and war threatens. The Captain is also forced to make a morally fraught decision affecting the fate of the entire set of crew and passengers, if there is going to be any continuance of the mission. It’s unsettling and effective work.
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