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.  Continue reading →