Novel of the future says much about the present

Review by Val Nolan

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Blue Remembered Earth
Alastair Reynolds Gollancz;
£18.99; Kindle £9.99
Review: Val Nolan

An intelligent, energetic mystery that balances a deceptively straightforward style with a complex and thought-provoking vision of the future, Alastair Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth might be the first great novel of the year. That it is science fiction is incidental — brimming with the optimism and gee-whiz wonder all too often absent from modern writing, this is a terrific book.

Set in the mid-22nd century, the novel follows Geoffrey Akinya, scion of Africa’s most powerful family and a biologist studying elephant cognition in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. Geoffrey wants to be left alone, but his scheming, purse-string-holding cousins have different ideas. There are loose ends after the death of his grandmother, matriarch of "a business empire as wide as the Solar System", so the reluctant Geoffrey is tasked with investigating.

His journey begins on an Earth that has weathered war and climatic catastrophe to emerge as a utopia. But not all are happy to trade liberty for security. One of these is Geoffrey’s sister, Sunday, with whom he conspires to unravel family secrets. A sculptor, Sunday has emigrated to the dark side of the Moon, to a descrutinised zone where millions live free from "dollar-eyed" industrialists and "legislation made by stupid, short-sighted governments".

This strand of the novel exemplifies science fiction’s ability to comment on the present. While the descrutinised zone is never linked to the Occupy movement, the similarities are difficult to ignore: "It’s not all about being crypto-anarchists and throwing wild parties," Geoffrey is told. No, it’s about resisting corporate and governmental dominance of the individual; it’s about "creativity, the impulse to experiment, and the urge to test social boundaries."

Reynolds too has chosen to push the limits, with much of the technology in Blue Remembered Earth — from space elevators to VASIMR propulsion — drawn from proposals on the cutting edge of physics. A leading proponent of hard (meaning ‘realistic’) science fiction, Reynolds provides a futuristic tune-up for everything from crime prevention to voicemail. His characters exist in an augmented reality, a plausible extrapolation from the "layers of distorting mediation" implicit in our increasing reliance on smart phones and social media. Interested in artificial intelligence, he equips this information space with the kind of digital avatar we might someday be mining Facebook profiles to create, a software "construct" of Grandmother Akinya, who guides Geoffrey and Sunday on their quest.

Blue Remembered Earth has a warmer tone than the post-human Gothicism of Reynolds’s Revelation Space series or his steroidal update of Arthur C Clarke, 2005’s Pushing Ice. Characters like Geoffrey, with his love of the elephant herd, ground the story in the face of startling disclosures. His grandmother’s trail leads towards the murky depths of trans-Neptunian space, but in his heart Geoffrey never leaves Africa. If Blue Remembered Earth has a natural genre it is novels of home, family, and responsibility. Highly recommended.

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, February 11, 2012