“Merlin’s Gun”, which is (for now) the last word in the Merlin sequence, was apparently written first, over a decade before the drafting of “Minla’s Flowers”. I won’t comment further on it here, other than to say that it’s a good story, and it’s interesting to see it in the wider context of the two adjacent, connected stories. “Minla’s Flowers” is a story I’ve reviewed before, as one of the components of the first New Space Opera anthology.

Their only hope for escape is to hide, but how? While the milieu of these stories is rather different to that of Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” universe, there are distinct commonalities in tone and pacing. The mechanoid Huskers are relentlessly closing on the Cohort vessel on which Merlin is a crewmember.

“Hideaway” is the first of a trio of stories focussing on Merlin, a far-travelled refugee from a Galaxy-spanning conflict. It deals with the aftermath of a terrorist attack, in one reality, on the city of Cardiff. “Cardiff Afterlife”, in some sense a sequel to “Signal to Noise”, is the shortest piece in the collection. Can the bereaved Mike find closure, or solace, through meeting a different version of his dead spouse? Reynolds does an excellent job of capturing the interpersonal dynamics, the inevitability of loss, the conflicting emotions of a grief filtered through quantum duality. Mike Hutchins’ wife is killed in a traffic accident, in one reality. “Signal to Noise” is a beautifully executed tragedy. “Enola” is a shorter work of personal-or is that machine?-redemption, as a thinking weapon struggles to understand the implications of its role for the remnants of humanity. In the space of thirty pages, Reynolds manages to convey in an utterly memorable fashion the ‘sense-of-wonder’ to which all SF aspires. “Beyond the Aquila Rift” is an almost-perfect story of a routine space flight gone astray. But Grossart is a man of many parts … The worldbuilding in this story is striking, with some highly effective background touches, but as a character interaction it left me slightly nonplussed. She meets Jim Grossart, first human to touch the red planet, or at least someone claiming to be him. “The Real Story” concerns Carrie Clay, a journalist, who’s hoping to uncover the truth behind the events of the first manned Mars landing. Zima Blue is a newly-assembled collection of short stories and novellas. He persists, too, in writing shorter fiction. Probably best known for his Revelation Space sequence, he has also produced several stand-alone novels. His work is consistently characterised by a clarity of description and of scientific thought which presumably owes something to his earlier career as a European Space Agency scientist. Over the past decade, Alastair Reynolds has cemented his initial promise as one of the heavyweights of space-based SF.

(Review first appeared in ASIM 47, August 2010)

Beyond the aquila rift book review