Pushing Ice
In 2057, Bella Lind and the crew of the Rockhopper mine comets for their ice, but when Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, inexplicably leaves its orbit and heads out of the solar system at high speed, Bella is assigned to follow it.
Stats for nerds
18recommend
29mentions
25people
2011–2026years
66% recommend31% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Pushing Ice is a great sci-fi novel.
I really don't want to spoil it, but Reynolds does have something of a solution to the problem of the speed of light being so limiting, and it's based on time dilation. As usual with all things sci-fi, it's not practical, but it's fairly unique and fun to read.
- Echoing others, Reynolds (House of Suns, Pushing Ice, the Revelation Space series), Stross (Accelerando, Glasshouse, and Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood are my favorites), and Rajaniemi (the Quantum Thief trilogy) scratch roughly the same itch for me.
- "Wonder" might be the wrong way to describe it, but Blindsight by Peter Watts gave me the same feeling of "this is incredibly alien and I have no idea what will happen next".
Other books with a similar plot structure and deeply alien vibe:
- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (recommended elsewhere in this thread)
- Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
I know there's one I'm forgetting.
- While reading Pushing Ice a very common thought I had was "did Reynolds want to do a Rama sequels?"
Shroud is great, easy recommendation. Another of Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay, also great, also very alien.
- Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series is modern and without humans as the bad guys. And highly recommended too. The books are also more standalone than calling it a series would suggest, but he also has lots of other one-shot books, and a few trilogies, if that would be a better way for you to try him out. I got into him via the standalone Pushing Ice.
- Blindsight by Peter Watts
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
Startide Rising by David Brin
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
Solaris by Stanisław Lem
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Translation State by Ann Leckie
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
This is what sprang to mind as answering that sort of brief off the top of my head.
