Slow Bullets

An interesting high concept sci fi novella. Our protagonist wakes up on a strange spaceship and tries to piece together what has happened. He had been fighting a war and had been injured. The ship he wakes up on turns out to be a prison ship, but where they are is a complete mystery. This novella does a good job of creating a nice mystery in its short page count, using some good hard science to back up its more fantastic elements.

I am a big fan of Alastair Reynold's sci fi writing. This book does not disappoint! A lot is crammed into a novella, and it makes excellent use of this story form. The novella title takes its name from small computers that are implanted into soldiers to store key information about them - service record, etc. This computing power is key to the story in many ways. The story also does well in its play on some fears that ‘cryogenic travel' impart.

All in all a neat novella

Featured on an episode of the delightful if at times very smugly snotty podcast “I Don't Even Own a Television”, Slow Bullets is a nice little soft sci-fi novella about a prison ship in a very dire situation. Alistair Reynolds enjoys his grimdark stories and this is no exception, but it's a short and enjoyable little glimpse into a world in great peril. There's a bit of a smug anti-religiousness that some people might find grating, but I felt it was tempered by having characters observe that there were positive things brought to the table by the "believer" faction as well. On the whole, if you enjoyed Revelation Space this is worth a quick read. If you've never read anything by Reynolds though, I'd suggest starting with something else.

reviews.metaphorosis.com

2.5 stars

Scur, a conscripted soldier, is captured, tortured, and left to die. To her surprise, she wakes up on a malfunctioning transport, along with war criminals and prisoners. She pulls the wakened transportees together to preserve vital data, and to carry out her revenge against her torturer.

I liked Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space, but I found subsequent books to be slow going and I stopped buying. When I saw this novella on NetGalley, I planned to pass it by. However, based on positive Goodreads reviews and the fact that I liked Reynolds' shorter work in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, I thought I'd give it a try. I'm afraid it's more like the novels than the stories.

Slow Bullets reads as a somewhat random collection of ideas with a loose envelope of story. The bullets themselves are a (particularly impractical) form of dog tag that works its way deep into the body - and has the ability to explode (for no reason ever mentioned). The other threads of the story are revenge (the protagonist is tortured and wants to get back at her tormentor) and religion (two warring sides have slightly different holy books). They're all wrapped in the idea of a ship that has kept them asleep for a millennium, but whose systems have deteriorated.

All of those ideas could be interesting, but in practice, they're not. The sections on religion (of which there are several) are simultaneously pointed and dull. They provide color to the story, but of a peculiarly faded hue. The environmental concept - a ship running low on resources - has been covered by many, and quite similarly by Ben Bova's Exiles trilogy. The prose throughout, but especially at the start, is cursory. There's eventually an embedded pseudo explanation for this, but not one that really holds water in context.

Many of the technical obstacles in the story don't hold up. There are other, more logical things the characters would more likely have chosen to do. Some givens never make sense at all (the slow bullets themselves, for example). It's of a piece, however, with their emotional reactions, which seem strangely subdued - underlining the point that the story is not about the bulk of the humans on the ship, who are essentially window dressing, but about three central characters (perhaps two). The bulk of the characters (mostly very hard cases) simply don't act like people would, and it's never explained. Even the protagonist is largely unconvincing, and we never really build much sympathy with her (though most of the others accept her story without corroboration).

The writing itself is fairly solid, but also stolid, and that's also of a piece with Reynolds' style. I firmly believe Reynolds is a talented writer, and yet remarkably little of what he writes actually holds my attention. Much of this novella feels like a dense data dump, and not exciting data at that. There is one interesting twist suggested at the end, but it's so buried that it doesn't have much impact.

If you're a serious fan of Reynolds' work, I'm sure you'll like this as well. It fits his style, but with less cohesion than his other work. If you haven't encountered Reynolds, this is not the place to start. Try Century Rain instead.

NB: Received free copy from Net Galley.