Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

It’s been a while since I read any space opera and “Pushing Ice” was an enjoyable read which ticked all the boxes: spaceships, aliens (some nice; some nasty) and technology so advanced it might as well be magic.

The book is set in the near future when the asteroid belt has been opened up as a source of raw materials. Bella Lind and the crew of her ship the Rockhopper capture these lumps of rock and ice and push them back to earth, hence the title. When the moon Janus turns out not to be a moon at all but an alien artifact accelerating out of the solar system, the Rockhopper is the only ship close enough to study it before it passes beyond the reach of us humans forever.

I rather enjoyed the depiction of the macho culture of the asteroid miners. I lost track of the number of times in the opening chapters that one of the crew laconically remarks, “We push ice. It’s what we do.”. I tried introducing, “We push bits. It’s what we do.” at work, but nobody wanted to join in...

I like the fact that much of the book is character driven. The older I get, the more it bothers me that much “hard SF” reads as if it has been written by an adolescent boy with Asperger’s. The only problem is that I did stop reading it briefly because the interaction of the characters was just too real. As the stresses and strains of the mission cause the team to fracture and begin stabbing one another in the back, it started to remind me rather too much of being at work. At least we haven’t had any actual murders here...

There is a slightly odd structure to “Pushing Ice”. It is (as Dr M who lent it to me observed) a book of three halves. That is, rather than one overall plot, we appear to have three largely separate stories arranged sequentially. The very best science fiction books like “Salt” or “The Handmaid’s Tale” are not only cracking reads, but carry a political message, or tell us something fundamental about the nature of humanity. What do we learn from “Pushing Ice”? That you can’t trust corporate bosses? That when women fall out they are meaner than men? That just because you feel like you’re in an inertial reference frame, it aint necessarily so? The lack of a big concept or philosophical theme means that the book remains a well-executed piece of genre writing, but there's nothing wrong with that!