On the Steel Breeze

[sawyl]

Despite the on-going shortage of storage space, I recently snagged myself a physical copy of Alastair Reynolds' truly excellent On the Steel Breeze, the second in his Poseidon's Children series following members of the Akinya clan over centuries and light years.

The prologue opens with Chiku Akinya reflecting on how she once existed as three people and how each of the Chiku's, Red and Green and Yellow, were set on different paths through life: one to chase through space after their grandmother's frozen body; one to join the first great human settlement mission to the extra-solar world of Crucible; and one to remain safe on Earth.

The story proper opens with Chiku Yellow, the stay-behind, receiving a ghost transmission from her sibling on the distant holoship of Zanzibar. A serious accident while investigating an exotic branch of physics has led Chiku Green to discover a hidden shipboard area keyed to the blood of a descendent of Eunice Akinya. Opening the lock Chiku discovers that there are good reasons for believing that something has tampered with the data they've gathered about their destination and entreats her counterpart on Earth to investigate an entity called Arachne.

Chiku Green takes up the challenge and goes in search of some old friends of her family: the archeologist June Wing and the post-human Arethusa, both of whom have information about Arachne's origins and her control of the data generated by the Ocular telescope. But Chiku's initial investigations, made before she understood the nature of her target, have drawn Arachne's attention onto her and she finds herself at the centre of a series of accidents as she tries to put together the data required by her counterpart in deep space.

By splitting his protagonist into parts, Reynolds manages the particularly neat trick of allowing the same character to exist in locations separated by tens of light years; and by allowing one of them to go into hibernation for forty years with the other succumbing to decades of depression, he gives himself a means of stepping over the vast communication lags between the pair without losing momentum. By allowing the two Chikus to share memories, he gives himself a clever way of context switching — what seemed to be events seen from Yellow's viewpoint was actually Yellow's memories unpacking in Green's head and vice versa — and parcelling out knowledge between the characters.

In Blue Remembered Earth, where Earth seems pretty utopian despite — or even because — every aspect of life is discreetly overseen and managed by the benign dictatorship of the Mechanism AI. But while Earth of On the Steel Breeze is largely unchanged some of Chiku Yellow's chance discoveries throw the neutrality of the Mechanism into doubt, turning the Surveilled World into a panopticon that has her second-guessing everything she does in case it should be judged as a threat to the ruling AI.

And while life on Chiku Green's home holoship of Zanzibar seems pretty idyllic, its politics seem every bit as murky as politics anywhere and its politicians often have to do unpleasant things to placate the powerful factions in the Community of Worlds — the council responsible for overseeing the caravan of ships — some of whom are deeply ambivalent about slowing down to bring them into orbit around their destination.

In a lot of ways On the Steel Breeze feels like the other half of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312. Both feature solar system tours, unusual post-human protagonists, powerful AIs, and both are lyrically beautiful in places — Reynolds description of an aquatic funeral, complete with a 40 part motet, is particularly moving. But both novels take very different approaches to their subject matter: Reynolds is pacy and plot driven, while Robinson focuses on character and contemplation, with the thriller element relegated almost to the background. That's not to take anything away from either book.

I think On the Steel Breeze might just be Reynolds best book so far.