Friday, July 21, 2023

Short Book Reviews: A Time-Twisting Space Mystery

 Eversion, by Alastair Reynolds (Orbit)


Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite writers of hard science fiction. His stories sweep me up in adventure, mystery, and very cool ideas. With Eversion, he’s reached new heights of complex yet rewarding storytelling. In it, he builds mystery upon mystery, with each layer adding connections and insights. He always “plays fair,” giving the reader everything they need to understand the characters and the dilemmas he has thrust them into at that moment. The book is a primer of brilliantly handled plot twists!

The story begins as a sea adventure: an 1800s expedition to discover an enigmatic structure, “the Edifice,” deep within a fissure in the ice cliffs of Norway. The narrator is the ship’s physician, recruited at the last minute and therefore not on the ship’s manifest. As he performs his medical duties, he develops relationships with the rest of the crew and passengers, including the arrogant tycoon who’s financed the expedition, a brilliant but tortured young mathematician, and a disturbingly flirtatious woman who seems to have no other function than to torment the doctor. Soon, however, things go horribly wrong. Even as the ship finds the bizarre, possibly inhuman structures of the Edifice, it also discovers the wreckage of an earlier ship, one the tycoon lied about… and then the doctor dies and finds himself a century later on an airship encountering the Edifice in a different, expanded form, and the previous ship, but with strange, fragmented memories of having been in a similar situation before. With each iteration of an exploration gone horribly wrong, the doctor makes new connections and comes closer to what’s really going on, the truth beneath the narratives. It’s a gorgeous spiral of self-discovery, tense action, and ultimate sacrifice.


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