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It’s been over five years since I read and reviewed one of Alastair Reynolds’ books so I guess reviewing Pushing Ice is long overdue.

I actually keep a list of books I want to read. Which books I read and when depends somewhat on whether or not I can find them in my local public library system. I mean chances are, I’ll only read the book once (so many books, so little time), so I can hardly afford to buy them all (one wonders how people afford to buy all of the brand new SciFi books being put out just to be able to vote on them for the Hugos, Nebulas, or other much vaunted awards?).

This book started off slowly. I didn’t expect that. After all, in the beginning of the tale, humanity has moved out into the solar system, so much so, that they’re mining comets for ice (water). Then, to everyone’s shock, one of Saturn’s moons Janus breaks orbit and starts accelerating toward interstellar space. Turns out it wasn’t a moon at all but some sort of alien scout or observation post.

The people with all the money, the United Economic Entities (UEE) offers the closest ice mining ship, the Rockhopper, commanded by Bella Lind, a lot of money if it will chase, catch up to, and study Janus for the few days they can before the moon outruns them. After much angst and voting, they agree to. But that’s not the beginning of the story.

The story actually starts ten thousand years in the future where the descendants of humanity are meeting at the behest of one of its Congressional members, Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird (yeah, it’s a mouthful) to find a way to honor their benefactor who just happens to be Bella Lind. No one really knows where Bella and Rockhopper ended up, but Chromis proposes sending thousands upon thousands intelligent monuments keyed to respond only to Bella’s DNA all over the galaxy and even into intergalactic space. The vote is being taken as the scene shifts to the distant past and Janus.

I don’t mind character-driven novels and I write a lot of them, but I was really getting tired of who was sleeping with who, when, what scandal it involved, Bella’s lost love who died in an unfortunate space accident, and children from Earth sending Rockhopper drawings of what they thought aliens looked like so the Rockhopper crew could judge the art contest.

It got slightly more interesting when the ship’s second-in-command and engineer Svetlana discovered that they don’t have enough fuel to get back to Earth after their Janus study. She suspects a conspiracy since the data from the company that owns the ship shows they have plenty of fuel.

Bella and Svetlana are best friends but the conflict on whether they should turn back and if Svetlana as faked her data tears them apart. Then Janus seems to be slowing down but Svetlana says that won’t save them at this point. She stages a mutiny (okay, everyone votes on it) and she usurps Bella of her position. It’s too late. Rockhopper is caught in some sort of “slipstream” that is pulling them along with Janus as it continues to increase to just within a few percent of the speed of light.

While all this is happening, a Chinese ship owned by a competitor of the UEE comes close enough for Rockhopper to fire a few “warning shots” (they carry nukes to “shape” comets) and they accidentally destroy the Chinese ship.

Now, unable to break free and return to Earth, Svetlana and Rockhopper have no choice but to land on Janus and attempt to use its power systems to survive until they arrive at their destination, which is a star in the constellation Virgo.

Traveling at relativistic speeds, hundreds of years pass on Earth, but for the Rockhopper crew, time is slowed (thanks, Einstein) and only thirteen years pass on Janus during the journey.

The ship more or less crash lands on Janus and is converted into a permanent home. Wang, the only survivor of the Chinese vessel, has crash landed on Janus as well and becomes part of the community. Svetlana banishes Bella to a distant colony they build where she lives alone with almost no contact, only occasionally being resupplied.

She has allies including the ship’s doctor Axelrod and Parry who runs the EVA/Mining group and is also Svetlana’s lover, but they’re the only ones who can get away with interacting with Bella.

The colony manages to find a way to draw power from Janus, but the Bella/Svetlana factions are very bitter toward one another. In the early days, one of Bella’s allies is brutally murdered. Parry decides that the perpetrators must be executed for their crime which is equally ghastly. I suppose this could be compared to the all-but-lawless old west.

Other killings occur sporadically before a Justice Tribunal is set up to manage crimes. Eventually, the community grows, but one member, Bella’s exec Jim, who had a brain tumor even before they began to chase Janus is getting worse and eventually dies.

There’s a process called Frozen Angel where the retrievable dead are preserved pending some future revival process and Jim as well as others, undergo it.

One of the company toadies who has been a royal pain to both Svetlana and Bella goes into a coma and comes out of it a better person (this becomes significant later in the book).

The humans find that Janus has seemingly come to its destination, a vast alien structure in space that has somehow stopped its incredible velocity and also formed a shield around the entire moon.

Then something cuts a big hole in it and through a long process, the humans find an alien spaceship on the outside of the “iron sky.” They also find and retrieve an orbiting black cubical object that came into the structure from outside before the doorway closed. It has a simplified image of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on it (see above). Obviously, it’s meant to be intercepted by humans.

Throughout all this, Svetlana maintains an incredibly intense hatred of Bella allowing her no ease from her exile. After the toady, in an effort of reconciliation (which Svetlana allows) enters the alien craft as humanity’s envoy, he is trapped and perishes inside. Then Svetlana listens to a plan Bella has, through Parry. Svetlana makes certain promises to Bella, which she goes back on, and enacting the plan, sends Jim’s frozen corpse inside to the aliens (they tried robots, but the ship only allows humans inside (dead or not).

He is returned rejuvenated and alive, but not quite himself. He does make certain demands on behalf of the aliens, who come to be called “Fountainheads.” The Fountainheads eventually are benefactors for the humans and ask only to be able to tap some of Janus’ power for themselves, which will do no harm to the human colony.

Bella regains her authority when Jim and the Fountainheads insist, and Svetlana is forced to step down.

Bella is tough but not ruthless as Svetlana was, even though Bella now refuses to have contact with her. The human colony continues to advance with Fountainhead help, and people can be made young by them in a relatively painless process.

Wang, with alien technology, is able to use his engineering vats to “3D-print pretty much anything. Children and then grandchildren are born. Bella finds the lost black cube and eventually touching it, discovers it was one of the thousands sent into the galaxy by Chromis. Keyed by her DNA, a substance is injected into Bella causing her to see a holographic image of Chromis, really a digital clone.

She finds out the cube has vast abilities, but Chromis is reluctant to share them all for fear its power might be misused. The Fountainheads feel the same way and refuse to share information about what else lies in other parts of “the structure” including data on the other intelligent races it contains.

This doesn’t last as a species the Fountainheads call Musk Dogs are set to invade their section with the aid of another species called the Uncontained. Apparently there are keys that can open the doors between sections. Although the Fountainheads caution Bella not to trust or even listen to anything the Musk Dogs say, Svetlana believes the Fountainheads are lying (she’s portrayed as oppositional to anything Bella supports).

She contacts the Musk Dogs who literally “mark” Svetlana for ownership by peeing on her (yuck). They promise technology including the keys between sections and interialess, relativistic speed engines in exchange for tapping some of Janus’ power.

Svetlana is betrayed. The Musk Dogs want to overload the Janus power supply and blow a hole in the side of the structure so they can escape into space. Only one other species has gotten out and they were never heard from again. The structure is self-healing and the hole closes within a matter of days.

Chromis has told Bella that the original structure in the Virgo constellation was just an accelerator and that Janus travelled a lot longer and faster than anyone realized. Chromis doesn’t know if they’re even in the galaxy anymore and the cube has no data about where it is.

With the Musk Dog operations about to destroy Janus, Svetlana had tried to build a key out of Musk Dog plans in an illegal vat, but it was booby trapped and the outlying community is being destroyed. Bella, who could have used the power of the cube to take everything from Svetlana by force, has refrained, but now must use it to save the outer community including Svetlana’s and Parry’s daughter.

Chromis succeeds in saving some people and containing the reaction but at the cost of the cube and her continued communications with Bella.

In a rescue effort, Svetlana’s daughter Emily and twenty-six others are saved, but Bella gives her life in the effort.

With the destruction of Janus imminent, Wang is able to construct a working key (he had help from Chromis before she died/went offline) and the five-hundred colonists are evacuated to a ship with the help of Jim and one of the Fountainheads. They make it to another section and close the door before Janus explodes, leaving the Musk Dog ship behind to perish.

Svetlana, finally putting her decades/hundreds of years long hatred of Bella aside, went back to retrieve her body inserting it (all too late) into Frozen Angel suspension. The Fountainheads might be able to resurrect Bella, but her brain wouldn’t be complete.

Svetlana, Parry, and a number of others want to exit the structure before it heals to explore the space outside. They rejuvenate before they go, and part of Svetlana’s mental pattern is recorded and used to repair Bella.

Some sixty years after the departure of Svetlana’s ship, a not-quite Bella revives and speaks with Axelrod. No one knows what the people who departed encountered outside. They did send back images for nearly three days before the structure healed as they accelerated up to nearly light-speed.

The location of the structure is unknown but it is a vast latticework of connections containing room enough for hundreds or thousands of species. The builders have long since vanished, perhaps moving on or maybe becoming extinct. The book ends with the potential of exploring this enormous set of worlds, quite reminiscent of Niven’s Ringworld and Clarke’s Rama.

A lot of this book was incredibly “soap opera-y” bordering on the ridiculous. I had a hard time believing Svetlana could maintain such a vicious hatred of Bella for so long, especially after the original reason no longer mattered. She’d much more easily forgiven the corporate toady, who had quite genuinely reformed and who had been a much more odious personality.

Really, there were times when I hoped Svetlana would fall off a cliff or meet some other gruesome fate. When Bella had the chance to abuse her, she still wanted nothing to do with Svetlana, but treated her with a lot more compassion and respect.

This book took a long time to “warm up.” I was intrigued by the mystery of Janus, but nothing I considered particularly meaningful happened in the first quarter to third of the novel. It was also not an effortless read and I really had to bear down to get through it, even once it picked up speed.

Although the book started with the cubes and Chromis, that entire sequence seemed almost like an afterthought of the author once he had created the various other structure aliens.

The aliens all seemed cartoony, especially the Fountainheads and Musk Dogs. They’re constructed out of imagery that isn’t really alien, but just adaptions of stuff we already know. Kind of like how every Star Trek race is just an aspect of human behavior or character.

I looked, but as far as I can tell, Reynolds has written no sequels to “Pushing Ice.” Yet there is so much potential including what happens to Svetlana and her party, exploring at least some other sections of the structure, and Bella possibly encountering another “Chromis cube.”

The book ends back in the future with Chromis losing the vote to send out the cubes but with the potential for winning the vote next time (obviously she did, so no suspense there). I can see why the author started the book that way, but I still wonder if it wasn’t a mistake. It seemed to contrived and a little too idealistic that in ten thousand years, a perfected humanity will continue (the book does reveal they do eventually go the way of the Dodo bird).