Amazon.co.uk: Pushing Ice (Gollancz S.F.): Alastair Reynolds: Books

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Product Description

Jon Courtenay Grimwood, THE GUARDIAN
"Hard SF doesn't come much harder. Classic Reynolds."

Anthony Brown, STARBURST
"As usual in an Alastair Reynolds book there are big ideas here, played out but not belaboured. A strong tale."

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Customer Reviews

42 Reviews

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

Not perfect, but a very good read, 4 Jan 2006

By	Dave Box (England) - See all my reviews

Pushing Ice isn't perfect, but it doesn't deserve some of the very negative reviews it has received (one talks about FTL travel which doesn't appear anywhere in the novel other than as speculation during conversation - so they haven't read it that carefully).

This is a novel of big ideas occurring over cosmic timescales. For me it successfully evoked the helplessness that would be experienced by humans when they are caught up in events they are unable to control and can only struggle to understand. The story manages to throw up plenty of revelations and plot twists - some expected, some not - whilst throwing up interesting questions on the ultimate futility of any human (or alien) endeavour. Yes, some of the characters are underdeveloped (Wang being a very significant one for me), but there is a driving energy behind the story that is maintained until the final page and that compensates for any shortcomings. Alastair Reynolds set the bar very high with his early works and whilst this is not quite the equal of them I feel that it is a stronger book than Century Rain and I'm already looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

Read it and enjoy it, but try not to worry too much about the ultimate futility of doing so.

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

Readable and entertaining but not his best, 20 Dec 2006

By	Alan Urdaibay - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pushing Ice (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)

Reynolds succeeds in creating a storyline that pulls you along - you do want to know what happens next. True, there are gaping holes in the plot and the characters lack realism or depth but you always believe that there is something about to happen around the corner and in this he does not disappoint. I didn't think much of some of the aliens, though - or their silly spaceship. The plot ends in such a way there is plenty of room for a sequel.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

You get what you look for, 16 May 2007

By	Craig (Croydon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pushing Ice (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)

I think this is a book of two halves. The first promises to build and explore relationships between characters. The second spends a lot of time exploring a new and alien environment. Sadly this is perhaps why the book doesn't work as a whole, although it is still worth a read.

Where the character relationships in a new environment might have been explored in detail, the author zooms out to focus on the "historical record" and even misses how the crew as a whole cope with a whole new set of imperatives. So despite having a nice little mystery to solve and potential hostile races approaching I felt I never really connected with any of the main protagonists. I think perhaps the difficulty in getting the character interactions on the page is the extreme timescales that Renyolds has built into his narrative which limited the opportunity for some personal story telling.

Having said all that this is Grand space opera and really it is not the characters of the story that are important but how it makes you think about space, time, why we are here and why aliens are stopping by for tea every week.

So should you buy this book. I say, yes, you won't be wasting your money.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Pushing Ice
Alastair Reynolds' 6th full-length novel is a stand-alone work detailing the fate of the crew of a comet-mining spaceship who become trapped on an alien object disguised as one of... Read more

Published 17 days ago by Jane Aland

Surely it can't be a standalone title?
My problem with this book is that it leaves a /huge/ number of loose ends. About half to two-thirds of the way through, I was wondering how Reynolds was going to weave together... Read more

Published 5 months ago by Steve Rencontre