Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds

Most of Reynolds work has a strong adventure and visual component, but here it has been pushed to new levels- where before a certain visual element seemed more traditionally science fictional, now there is a more cinematic quality where the scale of things is not so frequently overwhelming but can be easily imagined fitting in a movie screen. And with the adventure we get serial scenes of narrowly averted danger happening to the same protagonist characters- rather than just a single set of climactic actions only near the end. The end-result is a faster paced book that would make for a good animated movie or graphic novel.

It's also interesting to contrast the world-building efforts of all the Galactic North novels with one-off novels like this (though the ending makes room for sequels, I don't really see a huge set of novels, novellas, and short stories). The setting is much more tighter, the author doesn't have to always leave so much room open for future stories to take place, or create references for things that can be fleshed out by future works.

I think I'll pick up Pushing Ice as soon as I can now.

One frustrating element of many novels like this is that the reader is thinking of things before the protagonists get to say them, or are confused when the protagonist comes into contact with allies but doesn't immediately give them the critical new piece of information. Usually I write down the page number when I think of something, but in this novel it is usually within a chapter or two the protagonists get around to thinking of it- so it is forgive-able for the purposes of pacing- though still sometimes when they do express the idea they sound as if they had thought of it long before but didn't bother to tell anyone (or the narrator chose not to relate the earlier telling in order to keep the reader in the dark).

(spoilers)

15 - At first I thought the clouds were like Pattern Jugglers, but later explanations make them seem much more different.

35 - first inkling to me of time travel.

I didn't have a convenient writing paper so I missed a lot of other thoughts, but for most of them like I wrote above the characters think of the same things within a few pages. The coincidence that the apparent divergence of E2 and the how long ago the war with the Slashers was seems to be important, but Verity mentions it for the first time very late in the novel.

The most glaring omission or ill-thought out possibility was the danger of damaging the ALS surrounding E2. The ALS is the source of heat and light for E2, so if it were to be damaged permanently or for a long length of time then E2 could freeze and kill its inhabitants. In the climax the ALS is shown to be resilient to damage, but why didn't anyone worry about turning off the sun accidently before they knew that? And why aren't future penetrations with more antimatter considered as a way of restoring contact with E2 (and perhaps a permanent gateway could be established- or a wormhole dragged inside before the hole closes?).

More comments:

It seems like the neutrino mapping would show which of the ALSs might have earth's inside them- they have sufficient resolution to say an object and moon is earth and Moon-like right? It doesn't really make sense that the rate of time inside the shell would be different depending on whether there is a wormhole link or not- the neutrinos passed through the shells, therefore the unless the bending of physics by the ALS is more than suggested the neutrinos would have to speed up or slow down depending on the rate of passage of time- and neutrinos do weakly interact with matter (though I suppose not enough to start the ALS insides into motion)- by what about the matter that is frozen in time? What does it mean for the neutrinos to interact with the time frozen matter vs. the time going matter? Does the time frozen snapshot not freeze neutrinos in their places also?

Why would the War Babies + Chatelier/Caliskan's brother want to hold back technological development when that's the main thing they need to locate the ALS? I think Verity says something about not giving the E2 residences an ability to fight back, but if the Slashders planned to return within the lifetimes of their inside agents and War Babies then they would know that the best bet is to have a planet wide technological base that will locate the ALS as fast as possible.

I liked the very rough visceral feeling of the wormhole travel- instead of glitzy shiny translucent Stargatey wormhole we get a blindy bumpy ride that rips a ship up.