Century Rain [Paperback]

Man, this one just didn't do it for me. Bear in mind, I *like* Reynolds - I devoured "Revelation Space," "Redemption Ark," even the turgid and unsatisfying "Absolution Gap," and was looking forward to seeing what he could do with a slipstream/counterfactual plot.

What have we here? Thin characterization, endless, tension-free chase sequences, and (surprisingly) lotsa pseudoscience. What I liked about Reynold's earlier work was the way he let nanotechnology, exotic-physics propulsion systems, and alien contact produce recognizably human cultural responses - but in "Century Rain" he's given us a mysterious, ancient "hyperweb" of wormholes interconnecting star systems throughout the galaxy, and it's the least interesting thing in the book! It barely figures in the plot except as an excuse to get us to and from the alternate history of "E2."

I dunno, man. Baxter's Manifold books did this better. Hell, even Carl Sagan did it better - and with less mumbo-jumbo around the physics of it.

Worse, Reynolds here commits the fatal error of cuteness. The wildly technophile Slasher culture derives its name and outlook from "a certain Web community of the late twentieth century" (ack), and there are at least three gratuitous in-jokes turning on famous lines from "Casablanca" - "stick my neck out," "beautiful friendship," and "Paris." (Don't get me wrong: I adore "Casablanca," but this ain't the place to celebrate it.)

In summary: this almost feels like a piece of juvenilia acquired and published after the success of the "Revelation Space" books. I'm not ready to write Reynolds off just yet, but I'm afraid "Century Rain" has knocked him off my auto-buy list.

Not revelation space. This starts with a genuine puzzle: humanity on earth has been wiped out hundreds of years ago. But contemporaneously a strange murder case needs solving in Paris, France. It's not time-travel or a parallel universe, so how can this be? Rather deus ex machina is the answer, but this is just background to the plot!

The Paris detective stuff is really not bad: believable characterisation, trademark snappy dialogue and organic plot development. Genuinely page-turning stuff.

At the half-way point it's all change, however. We get into an extended hi-tech chase sequence and the plot development stalls. The editor should have been harsher here. More serious is the collapse of plot credibility. Why would the "extremist slashers" want to unleash their genocidal plan on E2? Both revenge and the quest for real-estate are equally implausible as motivations. And the ending is scrappy.

A shame really - this had potential for audience crossover, but SF folk will like it, even those who hang out at /.

I was happy to see Alastair Reynolds setting a novel in a different universe than his first several books, good those those were. And I was interested to see if his particular talents survived transition to a different setting.

In Century Rain, I can say unreservedly that his spectacular hard-SF imagination is as evident as in his earlier books. That said, some of Reynolds's weaknesses remain: this book is as long as the earlier ones, and I rather think each of his novels would have been better at 3/4 the length or less. His prose is serviceable but not really elegant. His characters (with a couple of exceptions) are fairly stock. But that is -- well, not quibbling, but acknowledging weaknesses that are not fatal weaknesses. So -- acknowledging its weaknesses, I still enjoyed this novel, and I was often fascinated, by the end quite moved, and occasionally awed.

The story begins on two threads. One concerns Wendell Floyd, an American in Paris in 1959. But his Paris is rather altered: its technology lags our own 1959 just a bit, apparently because World War II never happened: the German advance on France stalled in the Ardennes, and Hitler was shortly later deposed. But the evils of fascism were not eliminated, and France in 1959 seems ready to come under the sway of a nasty nativist politician. Floyd is a sometime jazz musician who mainly works as a private detective, and he is drawn into investigating the mysterious death of an American woman, a death the police seem only too quick to write off as an accident or suicide.

Meanwhile, three centuries in the future -- our actual future, it seems -- Verity Auger is an expert on Paris in the "Void Century": the 21st Century. It seems that late in this century something called the Nanocaust wiped out life on Earth. Humans survived in orbit, and have split into two groups: the Threshers (including Verity) oppose almost all nanotech and bodily modification, while the Slashers embrace it. The two are close to fighting a war over possession of Earth. Then Verity is maneuvered into accepting a strange assignment: wormhole travel back to Paris in 1959. It seems another Thresher agent has just been murdered, and Verity must try to recover some valuable information she had gathered.

Obviously, the Earth to which Verity is traveling is Wendell Floyd's Earth, and the murdered Thresher agent is the woman whose death Floyd is investigating. Wendell and Verity cross paths, and sparks fly, as we might (being experienced readers) expect. Their romance is a bit underplayed, and not quite convincing. But they also uncover a series of mysteries, involving the Thresher/Slasher war, factions among the Slashers, and some really bad guys, including some nasty apparent children. And they learn the true nature of Floyd's alternate Earth (which reminded me oddly of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin). The resolution of these SFnal ideas is pretty cool for the most part. The driving motivations of the bad guys, however, are never quite real -- they are just a bit too genocidal for no terribly good reason. But the story does come to a satisfyingly exciting close, and Floyd and Auger's personal story is well resolved as well. It's a good book, not a great one, but certainly it serves notice that Reynolds remains a writer to watch.