It's a testimonial to how busy the past year had been that I missed the publication of not just one, but two Alastair Reynolds novels! The benefit of this is that by the time I got around to Eversion, Amazon had it on sale for $1.99, which made it an autobuy.
Eversion starts as an 18th century story about a sailing ship exploring in the north of the Scandinavian coast, with the narrator as the ship's surgeon (named Silas Coades) aboard the vessel. The ship finds an inlet with a lagoon with a strange building or fortress on the inside of it. During the passage into the lagoon, the ship meets with a mishap, and the narrator dies. Before he dies, however, the lone woman aboard the ship, Ada Cossile, tells him that he's escaping by dying.
The narrative then resets, with Coades now aboard a steam engine vessel! Each time the narrative resets, much as in a video game, we get further into the mystery. Reynolds must have had a lot of fun writing this novel, because we get all sorts of scenarios, including a dirigible and even a space opera type scene before the big reveals happens and we get to find out what the underlying scenario is.
The payoff is not disappointing--unlike many science fiction novelists, Alastair Reynolds doesn't write himself into a corner, and everything resolves. The story is very appropriate in the age of AI, and reveals Reynolds to have a deep understanding of both humanity and the machines we create.
What a great novel! Definitely a must read!
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