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Halcyon Years, by Alastair Reynolds
Halcyon Years, by Alastair Reynolds, is another book passed on to me by our local bookseller, and here are my thoughts.
Halcyon Years is Alastair Reynolds's most recent novel. Like Eversion it is a standalone book which is not intended to fit into any of his established series. Again like Eversion, it presents itself as a mystery which has to be solved both by a character within the book and by the reader. The similarities end there! Halcyon Years is set on a generational spaceship - no spoiler there as it becomes obvious very rapidly that this is the case, at least for readers familiar with science fiction conventions and clues.
The central character here is Yuri Gagarin, or at least a revitalised version of him. So far as he is aware at the start of the book, his psyche has been preserved since his untimely death and has been fairly recently instantiated into a suitable body. He works as a private detective who enjoys modest success at solving cases, and is unexpectedly thrown in to a vastly more intricate and dangerous mystery than he has tackled before. From this point on, the mysteries multiply, and Gagarin has to reassess most of what he thinks he knows about the spaceship's history - including his own role within it. He has to expand his role from simply investigating a single suspicious incident to uncovering a much wider and more significant set of things kept secret.
It's hard to go on with the story without getting into spoiler territory, so I'll swap to my personal thoughts about it. First, it's very competently written and edited, and flows very smoothly. It's not the kind of prose one might read simply for the pleasure of it, but it works well as a vehicle for the storyline. The plot and its sundry twists were broadly compelling, though there were places where narrative choices and the necessity of keeping the story going stretched my credulity a little.
Overall it didn't grab me in the way Eversion did, and I wasn't left with any immediate sense of wanting to choose it as a book club read. For me, there wasn't enough immersion in the world / generational ship for it to become either compelling or absorbing, and to my mind the closing chapter struggled to find a satisfying closure to the scale of the problems raised. On the other hand it is well-written and moves at a decent pace, and Gagarin himself is an appealing character. So I'm glad to have read the book, even though I can't yet imagine wanting to revisit it on a regular basis. Thinking of typical readership, it would probably appeal to those who like crime or mysteries and their uncovering. It's a bit like a longer and more complex variation of Asimov's The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. However, unlike those books I'm not sure it would be a good introduction to science fiction for someone unfamiliar with the tropes and conventions.
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