Halcyon Years

It has been a while since I read an Al Reynolds book. I loved the Revelation Space books when they came out, but then Reynolds moved on to doing other things, and he clearly didn’t need my help to sell books. However, having had a chance to sit and chat with him in Berlin airport when we were heading out from Eurocon, I got very interested in the next book he’s got in the pipeline. Also the current one sounded really weird, so I figured I should check it out.

Halcyon Years is a generation ship novel. The ship is called Halcyon and it is on its way from Earth to what is expected to be a new home for the 8 million passengers. The book is also a murder mystery, and the detective is a chap called Yuri Gagarin.

Wait, what?

Well it turns out that Comrade Gagarin’s corpse has been preserved, and he was included in a large collection of corpsicles being transported on the Halcyon. Every so often it becomes necessary to revive one of these people, and Gagarin’s number came up. No one on the Halcyon remembers who he was, and so he has ended up running a small, private detective agency. In other words, he is a gumshoe. The world of Halcyon is helpfully 1950s-ish, to fit with the genre. Which, if you think about it, is odd for a generation ship.

The case that Gagarin ends up investigating involves the deaths of two young people from rival wealthy families. The client, Ruby Blue, is from the ship’s Ministry of Works. She explains to Gagarin that there is a concern that these are tit for tat killings, though the police are happy that both deaths were accidental. If I tell you that the name of these young people were Randall and Julianna, you might spot the clue that tells you that there is far more going on here than meets the eye.

There is another clue that those of you who know your history of space flight will pick up on. Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash, and what remains could be salvaged from the wreckage were cremated. There is no way he could be resurrected from that. But the character in the book is convinced that he is indeed Yuri Gagarin. He has a notable Russian accent.

As is inevitable in gumshoe stories, poor Yuri spends a lot of time being beaten up. He ends up working with a drunken ex-cop by the name of Lemmy Litz, who talks like he is fresh out of Noo Yoick. Ruby, for reasons that will become obvious when you read the book, is not The Dame. Reynolds does provide something of a romance for Yuri, but his heart isn’t really in it. My guess is that the hearts of most of his regular readers would not be in it either, so that doesn’t matter much.

Quite a bit of the story is dependent on understanding stuff about space flight, which I am too busy and lazy to check out, but that did not spoil my enjoyment of the plot. I was pleased to see what I assume is a nod to Ken MacLeod’s Lightspeed Trilogy. But most of all I was just gripped by the pace of the thing. It is rare that I find a book unputdownable these days, but this is one I would have stayed up all night to finish if I had the stamina (which I don’t these days). It is a lot of fun, and full of interesting twists.

Of course there is another aspect to the book as well. It is a story set in a world that is run by wealthy families that do hate each other, but who are very happy to work together to keep the proles in their place. I am reminded of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun, in which the ultra-rich of Earth have had themselves uploaded into the mainframe of The Whorl and end up being worshipped as gods by the passengers.

It may even have a suggestion as to one reason why the billionaire class is so keen to enshittify our technology. As one character puts it:

“The problem, though, is that when people have equality and ease-of-living and too much time on their hands for intellectual pursuits, they feel empowered to start asking the wrong questions […]. Well that simply wouldn’t do.”

In other words, this is also a book about modern America.

Title: Halcyon Years
By: Al Reynolds
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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