/lit/ - Literature

>>22410177
Slow Bullets - Alastair Reynolds (2015)

Scurelya Timuk Shunde is a conscripted soldier who is being tortured to death, though that's interrupted. Whatever else else that happens is skipped over and she's awakened from a hibernation pod knowing nothing of her circumstances. She, and others, still have their slow bullets to remind of them their identity. A slow bullet is similar to a military dog tag, except it's stored internally and contains extensive biographical data about the soldier. Their prior identities may no longer be relevant, but in the absence of any other source of meaning, will it drive all of their behavior?

Slow Bullets is explicitly a message fiction novella about what knowledge is worth preserving and how what we know is related to our personal identity. Extreme measures are taken to conserve what little can be of what's known. It puts forth that maintaining cultural knowledge may be more important than literally anything else. The story doesn't start that way, but eventually it becomes more and more reductive to that's what it's only about. I suppose then that it's fitting that the reader's experience is similar to that of the characters. When the story begins it could be about anything, and when the characters awaken knowing nothing about their situation, anything could've happened. As they and the readers learn more, the possibilities steadily decrease until there's only a single one that remains.

This novella had a strong start and could've explored many interesting and exciting ideas, but instead it became increasingly insular and fixated upon a few ideas that I found dull. It's a bait and switch in that many readers would be expecting an epic space opera or at least a character study in the nature of identity, but instead find themselves with a lecture on knowledge preservation. The characters become less complex and developed as the narrative progresses because their actions are restricted both by their situation and by the message being delivered. The message that cultural knowledge, science especially, must be spread to as many people as possible, even in the face of extreme despair and adversity until your dying breath was overly much. If that seems like an obsessive, if not religious impulse, then I wouldn't disagree. Whether religion ought to be preserved is a major point of contention.

As I was writing this I found myself becoming more and more disappointed in what I had read. Not angry, simply disappointed that a premise I liked and that the fun possibilities and mystery it represented turned out to be so narrowly focused on a singular dogmatic ideal. There's initially more to it than that, and that's worth reading, but I don't know whether it's worth reading overall. That makes rating much more difficult. For me, it's core ideal wasn't nearly enough relative to what else could've been written about instead. I'm clearly bitter about this, but you may not be.

Rating: 2.5/5 (3)