Pushing Ice

Reynolds has a problem with his books lingering too long. While Pushing Ice does serve adequately as an entertainment-focused airport novel, it doesn't do anything else particularly well.

The plot, which begins with a group of asteroid miners being tasked with investigating an alien spacecraft leaving the solar system, mostly revolves around two women on the ship developing a blood feud against each other. Bella Lind, the captain of the ship, doesn't take the advice from her best friend on the ship, Svetlana Barseghian, that they may indeed not have enough fuel to return to Earth after their frantic chase of the ship. From here, the crew turns to tribalism as their competing visions for the future clash with one another. The middle third of the novel has a lot of time skips as the crew explore the spaceship (formerly one of Saturn's moons, Janus) and attempts to make a life for themselves. Think Rendezvous with Rama with more emphasis placed on the social aspect between the crew members.

Reynolds attempts to cram a lot of space opera/aliens/big ideas into the last third of book, but really doesn't have enough bandwidth to pull it all together. Not that the ideas aren't neat, I suppose, but he really didn't give them space to breath/enough analysis to make them really much other than an afterthought. I also just can't believe that the grudge between Bella and Svetlana would last so god dang long. Years and years and years of refusing to even talk to one another. To put such focus on such a childish issue broke my suspension of disbelief on several occasions.

I can't tell whether my cold-derived brain fog or the book itself is to fault for me not having much to say about it. It's okay. I really haven't been blown away by Reynolds despite his notoriety, and it's unfortunate that a lot of the problems that I had with The Prefect transferred to this work as well. Systemic issues like that are never a great sign.