Slow Bullets
Alastair Reynolds
Tachyon Publications
Paperback, $14.95
ebook $9.99; audio $21.95

Slow Bullets is a short novel (180 pg) in an intriguing far future setting.  I read it in one afternoon when I was in the mood for big idea space opera.

Scur is a soldier in an interstellar war.  She’s captured by a notorious war criminal just after peace is established, who injects a slow bullet into her leg and leaves her to die a slow painful death.  Slow bullets are little devices that are inserted in all soldiers.  They not only contain biographical information from before the soldier entered the military.  Insertion under normal conditions is quite painless.

What Scur is experiencing will kill her.  She manages to cut the slow bullet out of he let, then passes out.  When she wakes up, she’s coming out of hibernation on spaceship.  The spaceship is carrying mostly war criminals, which for reasons Scur doesn’t know includes her.

Only there’s a problem.  They are at their target planet, but hundreds if not thousands of years later than when they should be.  The planet is now in an ice age.

That’s not the only problem. 

There’s something wrong with the artificial intelligence that runs the ship.  In order to keep functioning, it’s writing over the memory in random order.  The survivors have about a thousand days before all of their culture and every scrap of their past that’s stored in the ship’s memory banks is erased.

Oh, and the criminal who tried to kill Scur with the slow bullet?  He’s here, too.

I really enjoyed this story.  It could have been a lot longer.  Most of Reynolds’ work is lengthy, which is why I’ve not read more of it.  I’m not always willing to make the time commitment.  Fortunately, he wrote at just the right length.

The pacing is strong, and the mysteries are well laid out.  Not all of the questions are answered.  Some may not have any answers, and some I suspect Reynolds chose not to give us.  The cultural events on the space ship are logical.  There’s a bit of hand-waving with the AI, but it’s reasonably well done.

At one point, Scur (who is the narrator and is clearly writing a memoir) mentions another character’s story in such a way that it made me suspect there’s another tale set in this universe.  I’ll have to look for it.

Slow Bullets reminded me of why I like big idea space opera, especially when Alastair Reynolds writes it.  I’ll be covering more of his work in coming months.