Blue Remembered Earth

Alastair Reynolds, 2012

(September 2012)

This one takes a while to get going. You read Alistair Reynolds for the scale and the delightfully icky feeling you get from the wilder of his grotesques. If you’re in any way averse to body horror, steer well clear of his novella Diamond Dogs, which is like an episode of The Crystal Maze as directed by David Cronenberg. The scope and scale of his Revelation Space universe is breathtaking, on a par with Stephen Baxter’s Destiny’s Children series.

So in all honesty, it’s a bit of a let down when we spend the first 200 pages or so of Blue Remembered Earth pootling around in central Africa and near Earth orbit. Admittedly running an orbital launch blowpipe up through Mt Kilimanjaro has a certain conceptually dramatic appeal, but other than that it’s just elephants, the moon, and a bunch of rocks. It’s interesting enough as it goes, and the exploration as to how societies might adapt to new technologies (and vice versa) is well done, but it all feels a little constrained. Cosy even. That’s not what we came for.

Fortunately the action eventually shifts properly off-world and underwater, and we start to get what we really paid for. The Evolvarium sequence on Mars is worth the price of admission almost by itself and by that point it’s stopped being something you’re sticking with through trust and admiration and become a genuine page-turner. Scale, awe, and imagination; that’s what we’ve come for. And that’s what we eventually, thankfully, get. In spades.