{"id":1163,"date":"2015-09-29T15:25:16","date_gmt":"2015-09-29T20:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/?p=1163"},"modified":"2015-09-29T15:25:16","modified_gmt":"2015-09-29T20:25:16","slug":"firing-slow-bullets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/firing-slow-bullets\/","title":{"rendered":"Firing Slow Bullets<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SlowBullets-140x220\"<\/a>Slow Bullets<\/em><\/a>
\nAlastair Reynolds<\/a>
\nTachyon Publications<\/a>
\nPaperback, $14.95
\nebook $9.99; audio $21.95<\/p>\n

Slow Bullets<\/em> is a short novel (180 pg) in an intriguing far future setting.\u00a0 I read it in one afternoon when I was in the mood for big idea space opera.<\/p>\n

Scur is a soldier in an interstellar war.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Slow bullets are little devices that are inserted in all soldiers.\u00a0 They not only contain biographical information from before the soldier entered the military.\u00a0 Insertion under normal conditions is quite painless.<\/p>\n

What Scur is experiencing will kill her.\u00a0 She manages to cut the slow bullet out of he let, then passes out.\u00a0 When she wakes up, she’s coming out of hibernation on spaceship.\u00a0 The spaceship is carrying mostly war criminals, which for reasons Scur doesn’t know includes her.<\/p>\n

Only there’s a problem.\u00a0 They are at their target planet, but hundreds if not thousands of years later than when they should be.\u00a0 The planet is now in an ice age.<\/p>\n

That’s not the only problem.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

There’s something wrong with the artificial intelligence that runs the ship.\u00a0 In order to keep functioning, it’s writing over the memory in random order.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Oh, and the criminal who tried to kill Scur with the slow bullet?\u00a0 He’s here, too.<\/p>\n

I really enjoyed this story.\u00a0 It could have been a lot longer.\u00a0 Most of Reynolds’ work is lengthy, which is why I’ve not read more of it.\u00a0 I’m not always willing to make the time commitment.\u00a0 Fortunately, he wrote at just the right length.<\/p>\n

The pacing is strong, and the mysteries are well laid out.\u00a0 Not all of the questions are answered.\u00a0 Some may not have any answers, and some I suspect Reynolds chose not to give us.\u00a0 The cultural events on the space ship are logical.\u00a0 There’s a bit of hand-waving with the AI, but it’s reasonably well done.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I’ll have to look for it.<\/p>\n

Slow Bullets<\/em> reminded me of why I like big idea space opera, especially when Alastair Reynolds writes it.\u00a0 I’ll be covering more of his work in coming months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She’s captured by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[669,759,784],"class_list":["post-1163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-opera","tag-alastair-reynolds","tag-space-opera","tag-tachyon-publications"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-iL","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1163"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1166,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions\/1166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}