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Alastair Reynolds Star Ice. Book Reviews Free Download Star Ice by Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds

star ice

The stars have their finest hour- and then they go out.

Nick Cave

Alastair Reynolds

AZBUKA® publishing house

* * *

Alastair Reynolds is one of the leading British science fiction writers. He lived for several years in Holland, collaborating with the European Center space research and technologies. Like many writers who have practical experience works in such "super-scientific" fields of science as astronomy and physics, he gravitates toward "hard" science fiction. But at the same time, his works are always dynamic and saturated with psychologism - this is a completely real struggle for survival in a merciless space environment.

The future Reynolds saw is the absolute cold and pitch darkness of interstellar space, dominated by artificial intelligence.

Publishers Weekly

Fans of good science fiction will not be disappointed.

Publishers Weekly Strange Horizons

Reynolds' sci-fi imagination is unparalleled.

Locus

Reynolds writes wiry, muscular prose that combines intense plot development with polished scientific language. All this is characteristic of the best examples of postmodern space opera.

Science Fiction Weekly

Her name was Chromis Dream-Grass Bower. In an effort to present her idea, she has come a long way. The premonition of failure, sitting somewhere in the far corners of consciousness, after jumping through a dizzying string of light years to New Far Florence and landing on the planet-capital where Congress meets, turned into a poisonous, evil certainty that burns inside: a humiliating terrible defeat lies ahead. There were always enough people who predicted the failure of the project - but now Chromis thought for the first time that they might be right. After all, she herself was well aware of how unusual and bold her proposal was.

“Yes, today is a wonderful day for a great cause. Indigo Mammatus Rudd stood next to her.

They paused on a balcony high above the layer of clouds that floated over the buttresses and gardens on the lower slopes of the Congress Tower.

– You mean, for defeat and humiliation?

Rudd shook his head and said good-naturedly:

- Last day of summer. Tomorrow it will be cold and windy. Doesn't that seem like a good omen to you?

- I can't calm down. I'm afraid to be a laughing stock.

“Sooner or later, we all make ourselves look like clowns. In our work, this is almost inevitable.

Rudd and Chromis were politicians and allies from different factions of the Lindblad Ring Congress.

Chromis spoke for a relatively small grouping of inhabited worlds: only one hundred and thirty planet-class objects contained in a volume of space a little over twenty-one light-years across. The Krasnoperka constituency was located on the edge of the Ring and actually bordered on scattered outside worlds Empire Loop-2. Occupying a much larger space, it had only four dozen planet-class objects. From a political point of view, there is very little in common - but just as few reasons for quarrels.

The woman ran her finger along the ring on her right hand, tracking intricate pattern interlacing lines.

Do you think they'll agree? After all, eighteen thousand years have passed. Isn't it too much to demand from people that they realize the importance of an event of such a long time ago?

“The whole point of our little undertaking is to celebrate the anniversary of nine thousand years of glorious Congress,” said Rudd, almost without a hint of irony. “If the rest of the delegates can’t move their swollen convolutions a little more and remember what happened eight thousand years ago, then the magistrates should be unleashed on them.

"Don't joke like that," Chromis warned grimly. “It's only been four hundred years since they had to send magistrates to hemlocks.

Yes, it was a tricky one. At least a dozen deaths. But, Chromis, I'm not kidding: if they don't get it, I would personally recommend calling the police.

Everyone would think so!

“So go over there and make them agree!” Rudd exclaimed, holding out his hand. - The time has come. I don't want to test their patience by being late.

She graciously took his arm. The rudd is very cute. Chromis knew that she, too, was considered very attractive by many in Congress. Perhaps they and a beautiful couple but their relationship is purely platonic. Both had partners on their home worlds, sleeping in stasis shells until Rudd and Chromis returned from New Far Florence. Khromis loved her husband, although she did not think about him every day. Without his help to convince one hundred and thirty planets that they must support one general idea, it would be very difficult. The project would have stalled long ago.

- Rudd, I'm worried. I'm afraid I'll ruin nearly a thousand years of training.

Calm down and stick to the plan! Rudd warned sternly. No last-minute brilliant ideas!

- The same to you. Remember keywords: "intended recipient".

The old friend smiled reassuringly at her and led her into the vast meeting room.

This building was built in the early centuries of the Congress, when it hoped to extend its influence to the territories now occupied by neighboring states. There was enough space on the New Far Florence: more than a hundred delegates were scattered over a square kilometer of the amphitheater, while the ceiling rose ten kilometers above them. In the middle of the hall, an unsecured cubic display slowly rotated. On it, the faces of the speakers usually replaced each other. But now, waiting for the session to begin, the ancient emblem of the Congress was spinning on the display: a three-dimensional reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man.

Chromis and Rudd took their places at the podium. The last delegates arrived in transit shells: black humanoid figures suddenly appeared in the hall, then the shell dissolved, revealing a person. The femto-machines of the shells merged with the machines of the building. All the artificial objects in the Lindblad Ring Congress—from the huge frame-shifting liner to the tiniest medical robot—consisted of countless copies of the same universal femto-sized element.

The first hour of the meeting was occupied by routine business. Chromis sat patiently, contemplating the speech. Maybe you should start with something else? Hmm... it's hard to gauge the mood of those present. But Rudd is right, of course. You can't change plans on the go. Chromis calmed down, gathered herself and, when it was time to speak, she said exactly what she had learned and rehearsed in advance.

“Dear delegates,” she said as her image appeared on the display cube, “the ten thousandth anniversary of the founding of our first colony, the beginning of what we now call the Lindblad Ring Congress, is approaching. I think we all agree that in honor of such an important event, something significant should be organized. It should fully reflect our achievements, our success, especially considering how anniversaries were celebrated in neighboring cities. There were many proposals on how exactly to perpetuate a wonderful date. For example, a large-scale construction project: terraforming a worthy planet, or timely rejuvenation of a star, Dyson's globalization, or - simply because it is possible - a systemic jump of the whole world. There were also modest projects like the erection of a dome or a sculptural fountain.

Khromis fell silent and looked intently at the authors of these modest projects: maybe those who dare to do such a thing will be ashamed of their horrifying short-sightedness?

– Among the projects there are many truly remarkable ones. Undoubtedly, there will be new ones, no less worthy. But I want to propose an act of a completely different order. Let's not bother for ourselves, build monuments in our galactic backyard. I humbly offer you something much more altruistic. I propose a bold act of cosmic gratitude: a message across time and distance. The addressee will be a person - or her descendants - without whom the very fabric of our society would look unrecognizably different!

5 reviews

Rated the book

In my mind, I should have been jumping for joy reading this book, because everything here is just the way I like it. Space fantasy, team of astronauts, sacrificial heroism, isolation from the Earth, creation of a commune from scratch, contact with aliens, multiple contact with various aliens. Interesting, exciting, fantastic, but not that. The main backbone of the book is its characters, which are a whole crowd and I didn’t like them, but it’s hard to enjoy a book when everyone around is enraged. The conflict between Svetlana and Bella is a facepalm, comrades. How can you fuck your brains for fifty years with absolutely no innovations and tricks? Teeth began to reduce already in the first third of the book and then it did not get better. All the characters are somehow strange, often their actions seemed to me stupid, unmotivated, too fixated on Svetlana and Bella. Well, I do not believe that such a crowd of people could bend under two inadequate aunts. But if you throw them away, then nothing will remain of the book at all. Because of them we are on Janus, because of them the commune as it is, because of them contacts with aliens, because of them problems with aliens. These two women are the driving force of the plot and it's terrible. And the finale? “If everything is destroyed, what is the point of what we did”, “The meaning is in life itself, enjoy it.” What? Where I am? What is it for? And let me down? I just put x .. on the table and am satisfied. Yes, I'm angry, so screw up a cool idea! Although I didn’t really like the author himself either, he often introduced events or dropped words in dialogues that were bound to happen, which the reader logically expects, it’s hard to explain, but when “this” happened, I felt fake and annoyed. Judging by the reviews, this is far from the author's best book, perhaps it makes sense to get acquainted with something more praised in order to form an opinion about the author.

Rated the book

I will say right away that I do not like space fiction.

I just howled when I learned the themes from the game. Space never really interested me, and therefore I avoided space fiction. It's boring for me to read about galactic wars, flying ships and planets that are millions of light years away. The only thing that I read from this is "Ender's Game", well, "The Girl from the Earth" by Bulychev. Ender did not impress me, but I really liked Alice, although I liked the Soviet cartoon more.

As for "Star Ice", it was not only the theme that was frightening here, but also the volume. After all, the book was more than 1000 pages in my reader. It went fast, but utterly boring. Yes, and my head hurt from incomprehensible names, and I didn’t remember the names of the heroes at all, because I just can’t pronounce them :)

I would never have read this if it wasn't for the game. And the book... The book itself is not bad, it's just not my subject at all. But it should definitely appeal to the male half of the population or those who love such literature.

bear_bobo

Rated the book

In 2057, astronomers clutched at the heart. One of the moons of Saturn, Janus, suddenly fell off the gravitational leash. Losing the ice shell on the go, Janus rushed beyond solar system. The object closest to the fugitive was the Crested Penguin. The mining ship, whose mission never extended beyond mining and transporting comet ice, was instantly given emergency powers and set off in pursuit of the fleeing moon. Getting closer to Janus means not only a chance to discover his secret and touch alien intelligence and technology, but, no less important for the owners of the ship, huge corporate benefits. And what is important for the team?.. Survive overtime. From and to. With bonuses for processing.
It will be that change.

A risky race for an alien mechanism, an unexpected robinsonade, first contact - each part of the adventure of the Crested Penguin should appeal to fans of the genre.
Alastair Reynolds is true to himself. Panoramas of deep space and the myriad potential for secrets kept by cold stars are his forte. But the little men and their swarming spoil the picture. The difference in focus is too great, and constant throwing between telescope and microscope does not benefit the book. On the space-time scale that Reynolds likes to operate on, seeing the same people with the same problems in thousands, tens of thousands of years is a bleak prospect. This, of course, adds hopelessness to the atmosphere, but ... Imagine that you are watching the death of a star, and suddenly out of the corner of your eye you notice how someone's snot (maybe yours) is flowing down the edge of the window. And then you suddenly start thinking about the drama of the bacteria that inhabit it. So... Alastair, we want stars. Undiluted.
The characters were never a reason to love Reynolds' books. Too clearly, constructions appear through the skin, functioning purely to fulfill the author's intention. "Star Ice" is traditional in this as well. The conflict of two "alpha females" is good as a starting point at first, but stretch it out for the whole book? Can the whole crew really be so blind and not notice his harm to the common cause? Really the team - strong, hardened miners - could not strangle the conflict by force, if the arguments of reason are useless? Apparently so. Because the author needs it so much to control the plot.
Alastair Reynolds in his repertoire: stop writing near the end, when a bunch of great ideas threaten to break your head. What happens to Alastair Reynolds while writing/editing book endings? This question could be the subject of serious research and a doctoral dissertation. With rare exceptions, its endings are all like a selection: 1. the climactic event passes in the background / is mentioned after the fact / remains suspended; 2. The characters begin to have long, meaningless dialogues.

Star Ice is typical Alastair Reynolds. Big ideas, interesting premise, amazing atmosphere, stilted characters and a crumpled ending. Those who know the author know what to expect and will not be disappointed.

Rated the book

Before analyzing the novel, let me indicate what space opera is for me as a genre. And that is, I have one friend who still believes that Dune is cooler and maybe Peter Watts has not written anything yet. And to a timid remark that, well, Reynolds said something about "you got it with your firefly."

My tender, devoted and selfless love began when I realized that in addition to blasters, space suits, mysterious unknown planets, the space opera can offer me heroes from whom I can take an example in my actions.

Because there was a boy Asters in Snegov's novel, who died at the age of ten, infecting the iron planet with life-giving bacteria, and at the age of ten I managed to criminally gobble up a cherry, from which my grandmother pulled out the seeds to make jam and then listened from the attic as my grandfather reprimanded that, in principle, flogging children is a good educational method, they flogged him and what, he has a sign on his house from the collective farm “exemplary estate”. So I don't remember exactly why I was crying, from the fact that there will definitely not be any signs hanging on my house, or from the fact that my parents carried a small dying Astra through the desert on a distant planet.

I'm afraid I repeat this maxim quite often, but in the novel "Star Ice" there is absolutely everything for which it is worth loving science fiction, as, however, there is something in it for which it is worth loving literature in general.

In short, it's exciting, it keeps the tension in the moment, or it's always interesting how this game will end in the end. wild story. In each part of the novel, Reynolds raises different aspects of the theme of "Man and the cosmos", well, that's what I tentatively call it.

It all starts with the fact that in the near and very real future, space will become work. Heavy, dangerous. Well, that is, it is such a social fantasy about a completely achievable reality. Then the action will be transferred to many parsecs from the solar system and the real robinsonade begins, but not in the sense of potatoes on Mars, but in how people will behave who have realized, but they did not want this, that they will never return to Earth, and then , which began as: “Guys, an incomprehensible contraption flew right next to you, which we previously considered to be a satellite of Saturn, try to catch up and study what it is” turns into “you and your descendants are forever cut off from the Earth, your survival depends on you yourself space is cold and you are surrounded by danger all the time.” All spiritual bonds on Earth, and your children are born here, enjoy. And the last, and in my opinion, the coolest theme of the novel is aliens. They are magicians with gifts or Danaans, and the fate of a handful of people and the ending of the novel in the end depend on the ability to negotiate. And how great Star Ice looks against its background. In which the main highlight of Reynolds's stories returned - the feeling that everything that happens is part of something immeasurably larger. Even infinitely larger, like the Galaxy itself. Yes, sometimes events are tragic, sometimes they determine the fate of entire civilizations, but for many light years something even more important is sure to happen. This is never said in plain text, but we know.
Quite unexpectedly, "Star Ice" by its very nature intrudes into the territory of "False Blindness" by Peter Watts. Here and there, there are satisfied motley crews of spaceships, as well as an unknown, incomprehensible, huge and alien starship - Reynolds' Janus and Watts' Rorschach. In fact, in the novels, the central place is occupied not by action as such, but by the psychology of people and communities, their reaction to the very incomprehensible, strange situation in which they find themselves. Oh yes, the main protagonists of the novel are mercenary miners, with their stamina and resourcefulness subtly reminiscent of their colleagues from Heinlein's book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
But the most interesting thing, in addition to all the misadventures and the struggle for survival, is the confrontation between the two main characters of the novel - Captain Bella Lind and the head of the engineering department Svetlana Barseghyan. The story of their tangled relationship runs like a red thread through the entire novel and determines the fate of those around them, whether they like it or not. And, in the end, it leads to a rather unexpected, but natural outcome.
The backdrop to this is the standard trappings of Reynolds novels - space travel, misunderstandings with aliens, gigantic time gaps, deceptions, and inevitable trade relations.
After all, the cosmos does not give anything away just like that.

In 2057, astronomers clutched at the heart. One of the moons of Saturn, Janus, suddenly fell off the gravitational leash. Losing the ice shell on the go, Janus rushed out of the solar system. The object closest to the fugitive was the Crested Penguin. The mining ship, whose mission never extended beyond mining and transporting comet ice, was instantly given emergency powers and set off in pursuit of the fleeing moon. Getting closer to Janus means not only a chance to discover his secret and touch alien intelligence and technology, but, no less important for the owners of the ship, huge corporate benefits. And what is important for the team?.. Survive overtime. From and to. With bonuses for processing.
It will be that change.

First about the good. This is the Cosmos, dark, cold, but still the same, which, like Clark, is "full of stars." This is deep Space, inviting you on an epic journey with many secrets, which for the most part will not be explained, as, however, befits the Greatest Secrets. This is a very distant Cosmos, spanning millions of light-years in distance and time, intricate cause-and-effect relationships, aliens of all sorts and shades, and technology comparable to magic.

The plot is really, really good. Humanity is settling into the solar system, developing new resources when one of Saturn's moons is discovered to be an alien artifact. Placed by no one knows who and no one knows when, he suddenly begins to show activity. One of the ships with ordinary employees of one of the companies happens to be the closest and rushes in pursuit of an elusive secret, which is why it is involved in a million-year journey through the universe. Like in Clark's Odyssey or in his Rendezvous with Rama: a huge mystery that invites Humanity to leave the cradle and engage in an epic adventure.

And this plot provides for almost everything that we want from space fiction. Spaceships, travel between the stars, aliens, unsolvable mysteries, exploration of new worlds, disasters and even space battles. There is everything, but the problem is how this "ALL" is implemented.

I will try to briefly and very intelligibly describe how this is implemented. If, God forbid, I have to recommend a book in my life that tells why women should not be allowed to lead anything serious at all, then this novel will be the first on the list. It will also be at the top of the list of books that tell why female friendship- a fairy tale for little girls. I can also recommend this book to those who are interested in the problems of personnel policy.

I have big complaints about personnel policy space age as it is described contemporary writers. One gets the impression that in the near future they will send not the most healthy, disciplined and professionally trained, but exclusively mentally unstable citizens suffering from such a set of phobias and neuroses that any psychiatrist will simply be envious. But it's still an easy option. In the distant future, only psychopaths, maniacs and sadists will enter the Cosmos.

Since we are talking about the not very distant future, the option will still be easier. But seriously weighed down by the usual for any century women's showdowns. How would you like this? In the not too distant future, there were two best friends Bella and Sveta (well, you understand: the girlfriends had no secrets from each other, and they trusted each other unconditionally). But the trouble is, one was the boss, the other was her subordinate. One day, something happened, and the girlfriends quarreled. Nothing so critical that two reasonable person could not decide just by talking to each other with the facts on hand, but the showdown literally took on a cosmic scale, and few people seemed to think. Such is the ordinary story that is repeated hourly on our dear Earth about the time when our tails fell off. Or maybe even from earlier times, when we were divided into boys and girls.

Sad to tears. Since all the wonderful finds - an epic journey through space and time, space battles, aliens, universal secrets, advanced technologies - turned out to be just the backdrop for a long, rather boring and banal history of the relationship between two bosom friends-enemies. Any inhabitant of the Earth from three years and older can easily tell a dozen of these and with no less terrible details. But I learned something useful from this: my list of complaints about personnel officers from the future was replenished with new items on the topic of female leaders. And not only in space.

Score: 7

From the first pages, the book looks promising. The author opens before us the prospect of seeing a journey of colossal scale and accomplishments, filled with the endless spaces of the Cosmos, its danger, the gradual disclosure of mysteries of innumerable potential stored by distant stars, the pursuit of the unknown, the possibility of the first supposed contact ... and so on. It is clear that this journey must be dangerous, difficult, it must carry a contradiction in the relations between the participants, conflicts, mistakes, decision-making - in general, the beginning of the book promised all this. I read the first part with ease and interest and I liked it. But that's where my interest ended.

The author, as always, fantasizes with ideas and for the most part they are interesting and bright. But at some point, the implementation of ideas goes to the opposite extreme - in the second part they become more and more crazy and crazy, and having hardly reached the third part, it seemed to me that the book began to look like a huge, bubbling cauldron suspended above the fire, into it The author throws everything in a row, the number of ingredients has no end - there is sweet, and salty, and spicy, and sour, who knows where it came from. He doesn’t even have time to mix it all up and doesn’t explain why he needs so much ... Maybe he imagined how the dish should look at the end, but before my eyes, abundant foam came out of the boiler, which extinguished the fire with its contents. There was smoke and a very bad smell.

Honestly, I'm very disappointed. Almost for the first time I did not like any of the characters, I even had nothing to catch on. At first I still prioritized, but after that everything came to naught. The conflict of two alpha females is good at the beginning and gives an excellent starting point for the development of history. But he also turned into a hysterical delirium that lasted for decades. A conflict that hurt at every turn. And no one actively contradicted this conflict, no one had the voice of reason. It is assumed that this is a team of powerful and strong miners who push the ice "" - but I did not see them, they exist only in words or somewhere in the very background. And on foreground everything is decided by women - they are in all the main posts, all decisions depend only on them, they manage the operation, they make a coup, the court and even execute them themselves - they run everything. And the men... where? where are these miners? In the foreground of them are a couple of gays, another one is on his deathbed, one is some kind of caustic conflictor and corrierist, and a reasonably quiet henpecked husband - these are all of the men who are in the foreground. There are those who timidly, clumsily give voice, sometimes flashing on the pages of a book. This literary, tolerance "" in the characters did not please me.

In the end, I didn't like the book. I understand that this book is completely in the style of the Author: an interesting idea, a wonderful intrigue, a great atmosphere, a lot of ideas, a crumpled ending - he almost always has it, but, to also have bad characters ... this is already too much.

Score: 6

Left with mixed feelings. The lion's share of the text is occupied by descriptions of a gradually flaring up rebellion on the ship, a showdown between the captain of the ship and the leader of the part of the team that opposed her (both women). Both parties are behaving unsympathetically (typical of Reynolds). The ending of the novel is strongly reminiscent of Rendezvous with Rama Clark:

Spoiler (plot reveal)

Janus, of course, turns out to be an alien ship in disguise.

With all this, the skill of Reynolds cannot be taken away. Oddly enough, the result is quite readable, although it is not the best of his novels.

Score: 7

"Star Ice" - production, Science fiction with elements of a ladies' novel. Unfortunately, both the "female" part and the production part prevail over the fantastic part.

It would seem that a magnificent plot plot, the presence of several various topics related to space, which looked insanely interesting at the outset of the novel, but for some reason in the end it turned out to be incomprehensible.

I can't stop saying that Alastair Reynolds is one of the most talented science fiction writers. new wave. He has a great sense of pace, he knows how to invent complex and unusual universes inhabited by unimaginable species of aliens, but he always fails to finish his novels. This work, which began as a close-range fantasy, with well-thought-out laws of physics and, in the technical part, is quite plausible, will not be an exception.

To be honest, the abstract looks really bright and intriguing, but the book itself loses against its background. By no means, I don't want to say that it's bad. It's just that the expectation turned out to be too high, everything was conducive to the most important meeting of the future, from which a new countdown of human civilization will begin. Whether this meeting took place or not, everyone will decide for himself and how it will turn out in the end.

The ability of the writer to create technologies of the future, to show how alien and incredibly far in the development of civilizations inhabit our universe, is his signature feature. Believe Reynolds, his "strangers" are quite realistic in the imagination, and you will never find similar creatures in his books, always something new and necessarily unusual.

I have no complaints about the fantastic part, there is a place for the scientific part, and for fans of interstellar travel, and for fans of extraterrestrial life forms. But there is one huge claim to building relationships between the main characters. It so happened that these are two women, once former girlfriends, and later became implacable enemies. There are an unrealistically many of them, it feels like you are watching some kind of Mexican “soap” opera, where the heroines constantly change roles and positions. Why did the author pay so much attention to them? For me, this is a big mystery, all the more so to follow their squabbles and squabbles is not at all interesting.

All in all, Star Ice is a decent piece of space science fiction, but not the best in Alastair Reynolds' collection. Fans of the author, and just fans of science fiction, read without fail. Still, it is not every day that books by authors of this magnitude are published and they should not be missed in any case.

Score: 8

Chilling cold of being

From " star ice» Alastair Reynolds is cold. The atmosphere of the work is so skillfully written out that it resembles Simmons' Terror. Dan's book can be read at any time of the year, anywhere on Earth, but the effect will be the same - you will be cold. Deadly cold. The same can be said about Reynolds' book.

The plot of "Star Ice" is built around a spaceship led by Captain Bella. The Crested Penguin pushes the ice, that's all there is to know about the crew's launch mission. However, everything changes when Janus - the satellite of Saturn - descends from its orbit and .... strives away from the solar system. The speed of Janus is so great that not the fastest ship can keep up, but the one next to it - the Penguin. And here begins one of the most exciting adventures in the world of space.

The fact is that it is very difficult to predict the future. I would even say that beyond the real. And in order not to slip into banal spoilers, I will outline the situation, calling it a contact. This is by no means the most important thing in the novel, but let the main thing remain a mystery to readers. So, the contact presented by Reynolds looks very impressive. People who get acquainted with alien life experience colossal problems. This kind of contact can be compared to what Mieville and Stevenson wrote in their books. Both, in my opinion, will still be stronger than Reynolds, if we talk specifically about contact with aliens.

There are a lot of characters in "Star Ice". The crew consists of almost 150 people, the author calls many by name and includes many in the plot. And let the book be difficult to read from this, but for each person one feels not just cardboard. In terms of the level of development of third-rate characters, Reynolds copes no worse than Simmons in The Terror. There are two main characters here - Captain Bella and Svetlana (!). Both are friends, both are fans of their work. At the same time, both characters are as unpredictable as possible, with regard to what is happening in the second and third parts of the book. Let me just say that through a bunch of "Bella-Svetlana" Reynolds destroys humanity for pettiness and short-sightedness. This is partly why many readers are dissatisfied with the author. Someone sees negativity here for the use of women, someone is dissatisfied with their behavior. But is Alastair so far from the archetypes of behavior, portraying Svetlana and Bella? Hardly.

Narrative language and dynamics. I have a small question for the translator. More than once or twice I have come across such linguistic constructions in the text that are hardly inherent in a well-developed translated text. Nevertheless, the book is readable, the eye does not cling strongly to the "weird" expressions. The dynamics of the work, I think, is below average. The volume of the novel is large, the author pays a lot of attention to minor details and heroes who are in third or fourth roles. But it's just not water. Each paragraph has its own purpose, it is not volume for the sake of volume.

Cons can be listed for a long time. This is both a sluggish plot and the work of a translator (editor). This also includes the behavior of the characters, which will seem strange to many. Another point that I personally did not like is that Reynolds is often silent about some details. And even if the context still gives answers to questions, it's still hard sci-fi, not weird fiction.

Conclusion: there are books that can safely be called ideal. Everything is so good in them that there are no minuses at all. "Star Ice" is not like that at all. It has downsides, quite significant. But the book of Alastair Reynolds is able to surprise and please even with minuses. In my personal list of the best sci-fi works, "Star Ice" boldly stands next to Watts' "False Blindness", it was from "blindness" that I felt this genre and started getting to know him.

Score: 10

This is my first contact with the author. A very voluminous, well-made work. What I liked - Space, deep, cold and hard. Technologies described in an ordinary and logical way and you believe them, artifacts of other civilizations are really interesting and impressive. The very structure of the universe and the development of other minds. Undoubted advantages of the work. Easy to read, fast and interesting. The plot catches, because there is intrigue and riddles. Of course, not all clues were found. I would like the author to pay more attention to the other world and the “space zoo”, but for some reason the author hit the female psychology. And this is a minus in my opinion. It's so fat for me. For in the end, motivation just evaporated in a vacuum. the initial conflict may be objective, a riot on the ship and all that, but then a transfusion from empty to empty and chewing gum. Moreover, the events cover decades, but our main ladies have not changed a millimeter - they still say clichés from popular psychology, do small and big dirty tricks and continue stupid enmity. By the end, I just wanted to quit the novel, I was very tired of these quarrelsome aunts. Yes, and apparently the author too, since he decided to just send one to hell, because the senselessness of the age-old conflict simply baffles.

And so the novel left pleasant impressions, and there was a desire to get acquainted with his other works.

Score: 7

Reynolds masterfully manages to convey the atmosphere of deep space, the description of all kinds of futuristic devices and the characters in various extreme situations against the backdrop of space and tie it all together into unique works .. This novel is no exception.

A group of assorted specialists on a comet-ice mining spacecraft get involved in the pursuit of a suddenly moving Janus satellite. At the last moment, the team realizes that they have fallen into the satellite’s gravity field and, with increasing horror, learns that there may not be enough fuel for the return trip, and where the satellite is heading

Spoiler (plot reveal) (click on it to see)

there is some kind of man-made astro-engineering formation that can turn out to be inhabited by some mysterious entities that are quite capable of helping unlucky travelers to return home.

As a result, a split is formed in the ship's team, which led to the appearance of two opposing sides. The novel is divided into several chapters, each of which shows a segment of the life of the crew members of the Crested Penguin for several years. The most interesting chapter begins after the arrival of the satellite in a mysterious structure. Sorry Reynolds at the end

Spoiler (plot reveal) (click on it to see)

does not reveal the origin of the structure into which earthlings and representatives of several dozens of other civilizations fall.

The chapters with the first contact with the fountainheads and the second contact with the musk dogs turned out to be very exciting. With an artifact from the distant past, and in fact from the future - a cube, the author did great, the main thing was that she was able to apply his power to the place when uncontrolled division began in the nanosmelter. Harmoniously and gracefully, Reynolds succeeds in weaving alien technologies and artifacts from various civilizations (my favorite topic, probably). As for the characters, the author's confrontation between the two women turned out to be a little feigned.

Solid sci-fi for all deep spase lovers.

Score: 8

Reynolds is predictably verbose. Even within the framework of a single novel.

But the atmosphere of the book is present. The atmosphere of a cold dark space, full of amazing secrets and ruthless to other people's mistakes. Inhabited by different races, but at the same time endless and empty.

And the author also operates with interesting fantastic ideas. His theory about the reasons for the lack of contacts with other intelligent life (very sad) and the proposed exit option (totally fantastic, but no doubt large-scale) is remembered.

And I liked the narrative in the form of a chronicle, with breaks of several years. It reflects the scale well.

The main regret from the book is the choice of the main characters for the story. Because such large-scale scenery - and such a banal story of enmity between two sworn friends. I don't really understand why a male author made two women the main characters. And after all, they seem to be normal characters, but when it comes to their relationship, it's an endless series of mistakes and inflated pride. Or an illustration of what consequences women's leadership can lead to. Although I do not think that the author specifically tried to denigrate someone. He seemed to genuinely sympathize with his characters.

Score: 7

Compromise.

Only one detail, not the most difficult to implement, was missing to prevent the mess into which the heroes of the book entered.

All their misadventures directly stemmed from the instant inventing of contradictions in the group at any critical situation and then the desperate unwillingness of the parties to agree. All they did was start pulling the blanket over themselves, not caring about where this would lead. It’s good that only two people tried on the role of leader, while the rest decided only who to work for. But the confrontation between the two commanders was quite enough to fill almost the entire space of the book. A book that, it seems, should be about space, because the entourage implies this, authorship ...

Compromise. For some reason, the author himself did not go for it, focusing on the relationship of people - and one can say that he did not make the most successful choice. Reynolds is best known for what? That's right, a frightening sense of the grandeur of the real space. Known for the bright and reliable manufacturability of the worlds he invented; characters, often unusual and multifaceted.

"Star Ice" has not lost anything from this list - but in the end, space and manufacturability are lost and forgotten against the backdrop of eternal human squabbles. Throughout the book, everyone is more busy redistributing power than trying to survive - and after all, the story was originally conceived precisely as survival in deep space (sort of). So much time has been devoted to the struggle for the throne that at the end of the book, when all ideas have already been exhausted, one of the contenders does not find anything better than to commit blatant stupidity by making a deal with obviously hostile aliens - only to spoil the opponent. The fact that this trick could threaten the death of the settlement and many inhabitants is not taken into account.

It should be noted that there are a lot of characters here and each of them has at least a couple of uniqueness - but the way they behave (especially in the finale), how much time is given to them is annoying.

But if you look around, you can see what a delightful world is wasted. Saturn's moon, Janus, turns out to be an alien ship, cyclopean, in astronomical units, alien structures in the constellation Virgo, attempts to survive with only a mining ship at hand and desire return to Earth, contacts with aliens and the discovery of secrets. If not the Universe, then at least the true location of the miners - and the answer, believe me, is no less impressive! At this very moment, stunning, striking in its scale, "Ice" returns to itself the interest that was born at the very beginning ...

... But no, we will continue to watch the civil strife. Here new details of the murder of one crew member were revealed, a friend of one of the chiefs knew this, but hid it, and now it is necessary to collect the court, because justice must be done, albeit more than half a century later (aliens gave people eternal youth, but who cares). All this plays into the hands of another boss in order to demonstrate the incompetence of the first and take power again ...

Based on the foregoing, decide:

Consider "Star Ice" not the most best book author. The characters and their deeds are given too much attention, to the point that in the end their conflicts seem far-fetched and implausible.

Unfortunately, this time the author did not combine the two themes so successfully, as it was with his own "Rain of Oblivion" - here people took all the attention to themselves, and the world was pushed into a dark corner. But it could turn out to be a smart variation on the same "Farscape", for example.

Score: 7

What certainly cannot be denied to Reynolds is the courage of ideas and the ability to transfer them to paper. Looking ahead a little, it would not be superfluous to say that Star Ice contains everything that is so inherent in Alastair's work: deep, silently keeping secrets, Space, mysterious alien artifacts, physical anomalies, interstellar travel (and other unimaginable distances), and Future technologies. All this is skillfully assembled and arranged here on a proper scale, allowing the atmosphere of the novel to immerse yourself from the very first pages and not slow down the pace of the story until the very end. The confident sci-fi part of the novel is really amazing, Reynolds writes in such a way that you can easily believe his ideas (even the most complex and sophisticated) and technological research, as if he is describing something that has long been hidden in the subconscious; in other words, Star Ice has enough pluses to boldly recommend it for reading and not regret it afterwards. And everything in general could have been just wonderful if Alastair had not decided to play a sophisticated psychologist. Without revealing the plot, it looks like this: two best friends at a certain moment they become sworn enemies and their irreconcilable (and absurd) confrontation lasts until the very end - and this is against the backdrop of such EVENTS in which everyone is involved characters. Turned out to be 260 (18,000/several million - underline as appropriate) light-years from home? Well, it doesn’t matter, it’s better that we settle scores for forty subjective years. Perhaps in this way the author wanted to show everything “human, too human”, and, perhaps, to show how homo sapiens not yet ready for Contact, but, unfortunately, all these subtle pseudo-psychologisms have only added volume to the novel, but not depth.

But even in this state of affairs, it is almost impossible to break away from reading - the plot and the aforementioned courage crowd out the obvious irritation from the grumbling of two (not the first freshness) ladies and their amorphous environment, which has not made any attempts to change the situation for decades. And even if later the desire to re-read "Star Ice" does not arise, it is definitely worth reading it once.

Score: 8

An interesting action, in my opinion, starts from page 410-420 and ends at the most interesting place (the book is over, read another). And before that, on four hundred pages, an undoubtedly talented author shoved a production novel with very little action. Four hundred pages of text, on which, for example, Efremov was able to describe most of his Great Ring, future history Earth and its social structure, the struggle of the Tantra crew with the gravity of an iron star, describe inner world Mven Mass, to amaze with the integrity and beauty of Veda Kong ... To fit the author the survival of the Penguin crew on one hundred - one hundred and fifty pages is still all right, but 400 pages is a lot. Even worse is the curtsy towards sexual minorities and the Chinese - so that the book is sold among them, I suppose.

And another question! Why did the machinery of Janus destroy everyone whose actions were of a repeatable nature? Why is there no answer in the text? Not even a guess.

Score: 7

The discrepancy between the scale of events and the pettiness of the actions of the heroes is striking. The Internet author Pied Piper, making an analysis of Western science fiction, wrote that American screenwriters seem to be simply unable to imagine a close-knit team: they will definitely fight over the most idiotic reason. This seems to apply to prose as well. All Svetlana's actions in the novel clearly stem from a bunch of complexes. (It is not clear how they passed the compatibility test with Bella, there must be some kind of psychological selection in the crew of the ship). So she offered a solution that promised salvation to everyone, but the bad Bella did not listen. Revenge on her for this, terrible revenge. But wait a minute, Svetlana's rightness was by no means obvious, Bella had very serious reasons not to believe her. But she even made a check. But the bad company has already managed to change the data. In addition, as the captain of the ship, she had the right to make the decision that she had made.

Spoiler (plot reveal) (click on it to see)

Svetlana arranges a coup and begins to amuse complexes. First isolates Bella for a couple of decades. Then it turns out that Bella has some information she needs. They conclude a deal on a significant easing of the regime, but Svetlana simply inflates her opponent and does not think to fulfill her obligations.

In my deep conviction, only a psychopath obsessed with a bunch of complexes is capable of this.

Spoiler (plot reveal) (click on it to see)

“This is not revenge on you,” she says, towards the end, not yet knowing that her actions will almost lead to the death of the colony. "It's for the common good."

Yeah, well, of course. There is a clear gap between the conscious and the subconscious.

It seems now that many authors believe that if the heroes do not have complexes and nervous breakdowns, then the novel will not be realistic. It's a pity! However, there is another reason, all this mouse fuss just allows you to catch up with more pages.

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