Short Book Reviews: A Time-Twisting Space Mystery

 Eversion, by AlastairReynolds (Orbit)

Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite writers of hardscience fiction. His stories sweep me up in adventure, mystery, and very coolideas. With Eversion, he’s reached new heights of complex yet rewardingstorytelling. In it, he builds mystery upon mystery, with each layer addingconnections and insights. He always “plays fair,” giving the reader everythingthey need to understand the characters and the dilemmas he has thrust them intoat that moment. The book is a primer of brilliantly handled plot twists!

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