Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Review based on a copy received from NetGalley and Tachyon Publications
Alastair Reynold’s Slow Bullets is a novella exploring issues of identity, memory and revenge. There are echoes of Iain Bank’s The Use of Weapons as well as some of the ideas explored in the Poseidon’s Children trilogy. The tone and setting of Slow Bullets is quite different to that of the gothic space opera (Revelation Space) or generation spanning science fiction (Poseidon’s Children).
The majority of the action is set on the prison transport Caprice as it recovers from a calamitous malfunction. The novella’s protagonist Scur and her fellow passengers awaken from hibernation to find the ship in orbit around a frozen planet and suffering from an acute case of bit rot.
Caprice’s passengers include war criminals from the two opposing religious factions. The war was over and a cease fire declared as the ship set off on it’s ill fated mission. As the ship’s systems fall apart, Scur and her fellow passengers have to deal with religious tensions, long simmering vendettas, as well as figuring out how to preserve millennia’s worth of cultural and scientific knowledge.
I quite enjoyed Slow Bullets. However, it feels more like a short story that was extended to a novella than a novel’s worth of ideas condensed to the shorter format.