It’s only then that he, and we, discover what looks like the truth. Always with the same crew, always relating the same events, getting just a little further and going just a little deeper each time. And when the doctor’s tale went awry, and he effectively rebooted his story, moving it forward to the age of steam and erasing the disaster that killed all his passengers, I was lulled into thinking this was about the story he was writing.Īs the doctor successively retells the tale, it moves forward in time, from the age of sail to the age of steam to outright steampunk and into the stars. Our hero is the ship’s surgeon, who is also writing a fictional tale of adventure in the vein of Jonathan Swift and Robert Louis Stevenson.

It’s the story of a doomed exploratory ship, at the edges of the known world, searching for a possibly mythical ice fissure that will lead to an epic, world-shaking, discovery.įirst, it’s a sailing ship in the Arctic. The way he does it is to put himself inside a story. So the reason the story is told, and re-told, very nearly ad infinitum, is to give the protagonist enough time and distance to process something that he can’t bring himself to face. This is a story about processing a tragedy by telling stories around and about it until it can be approached directly. Those stories still have universal things to say about the human condition, so we keep telling them. It’s why things like Aesop’s Fables and the Arthurian legends, the Greek tragedies and Pride and Prejudice have all lasted so very long yet still change in interpretations and retellings as society changes. Humans process ideas, events and catastrophes through stories, whether by telling them, making them or being swept away by them. And how to stop it all from happening again. And it's up to him to figure out why and how. Silas Coade is the physician, but only Silas seems to realize that these events keep repeating themselves.

In the far future, a spaceship sets out for an alien artifact.

In the 1900s, a Zepellin explores an icy canyon in Antarctica. In the 1800s, a sailing ship crashes off the coast of Norway. Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo,, Better World Booksįrom the master of the space opera, Alastair Reynolds, comes a dark, mind-bending SF adventure spread across time and space, Doctor Silas Coade has been tasked with keeping his crew safe as they adventure across the galaxy in search of a mysterious artifact, but as things keep going wrong, Silas soon realizes that something more sinister is at work, and this may not even be the first time it's happened. Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweissįormats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook

Eversion alastair reynolds review