Slow Bullets

[sawyl]

I've been meaning to read Alastair Reynolds' Slow Bullets for a while and now that it's been nominated for a Hugo — against Reynolds' wishes it was included in a slate — I've finally got my opportunity.

At the end of the conflict between the Centrals and the Peripherals, just as people are struggling to come to terms with the news a ceasefire, Scurelya finds herself cornered by an enemy sweep squad. Their leader, Orvin, is a notorious and sadistic war criminal who introduces a slow bullet — a data capsule intended to hold a soldier's personal details — into Scur's leg with no anaesthetic and leaves her to die in agony. We cut away from Scur just as she blacks out after attempting to cut the bullet out of her flesh.

Suddenly we're back with Scurelya as she remembers her awakening. She is in a hibo capsule on a dilapidated starship. Others are there. They are chasing a member of the crew. Scur steps in to save the man and he brings her to one of the ship's control rooms. From Prad Scur learns that the ship was once a liner but is now a prison ship, carrying a cargo of war criminals to Tottori. Scur has no idea why she is on board but, using the ship's CCTV network, she witnesses a fight for power between the prisons and notices someone who looks an awful lot like Orvin on edge of one of the scuffles.

Taking advantage of Prad and his access to the ship's controls, Scur forces the prisoners to separate into sections and ask for each section to nominate a representative. When the delegates arrive, she tells them they need to put together a plan to keep the ship running, to find out where they are, to work out how to get to their destination, and, last of all, deal with the notorious war criminal Orvin. The situation becomes increasingly complicated when the survivors discover that the ship's long-term memory storage is decaying and they risk losing huge amounts of information unless they can do something to keep it safe.

Slow Bullets is a slippery book with a brilliant setting and an enjoyably uncertain, unreliable narrator. The war, with its echoes of great struggles between the Abrahamic faiths over the precise nature of scripture, has obvious parallels with events in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it is hard not to see the ship's gradual loss of the collected history and culture of humanity as similar to those of the Cultural Revolution or the destruction of Palmyra in Syria.

Although the first person narrative works well, it means that some of the supporting characters feel a little underdeveloped. Prad is mostly their to facility the plot and the council don't really make a deep impression, but Murash is rather more interesting. Orvin is a violent enigma, but that's all he really needs to be and his ultimate fate and Scar's final conclusions about herself offer a glimpse of redemption — even if not redemption for Orvin himself.