Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


ALISTAIR REYNOLDS – Century Rain. Ace, hardcover, June 2005; reprint paperback, May 2006. First published in the UK: Victor Gollancz, hardcover/softcover, 2004.

ALISTAIR REYNOLDS - Century Rain

    The river flowing sluggishly under Pont de la Concorde was flat and gray, like worn out linoleum. It was October and the authorities were having one of their periodic crackdowns on contraband. They had set up their customary lightning checkpoint at the far end of the bridge backing traffic all the way back across the Right Bank.

    “One thing I’ve never got straight,” said Custine. “Are we musicians supplementing our income with a little detective work on the side or the other way around?”

    Floyd glanced in the rear view mirror. “Which way around would you like it to be?”

    “I think I’d like it best if we had the kind of income that didn’t need supplementing.”

    “We were doing all right until recently.”

    “Until recently we were a trio. Before that a quartet. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m beginning to detect a trend.”

   The world Floyd and Custine live in seems to be Paris in the mid-nineteen fifties, but something is wrong, though they — and no one in their world knows it. They don’t know either that all that is about to change and Floyd, an expatriate American private detective/jazz musician is about to become a key figure in what happens.

   So is Verity Auger, an archeologist who specializes in excavating the ruins of Earth in the wake of the apocalyptic Nanocaust. A wormhole has been discovered, and at the end of it like Alice’s wonderland a surviving Earth preserved as if in amber — Floyd’s world, and somewhere on that alternate Earth is a device capable of destroying both realities — and a madman who plans to do just that.

ALISTAIR REYNOLDS - Century Rain

   Over the last twenty years there has been a revolution is the hoary old science fiction genre of space opera in both the United States and in England.

   While popular, the American version tends to be militaristic and modeled on C. S. Forester’s Hornblower saga or Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey and Maturin books, whereas the British revival is something else, with writers such as mainstream novelist Iain M. Banks, thriller writer Paul McAuley, and astrophysicist Alistair Reynolds taking the form places E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith and his Skylark and Lensman saga never imagined.

   Century Rain is a good example of the new space opera, a sweeping adventure novel dealing with vast ideas and concepts and at the same time a meditation in noir recreating a version of 20th Century Paris out of Simenon out of Raymond Chandler, with a human and moral private eye at the center of the action of both worlds and solving mysteries both personal and profound.

   Eventually Floyd and Auger will meet and team to save both their worlds, and part in a bittersweet moment.

    “Floyd?”

    “Yes.”

    “I want you to remember me. Whenever you walk these streets … know that I’ll also be walking them. It may not be the same Paris —”

    “It’s still Paris.”

    “And we’ll always have it.”

   The ending as Floyd makes a painful decision about his own life and his own world is a Chandleresque moment of perfect pitch on Reynolds’ part.

   A world killer, some nasty monsters, galaxy spanning concepts of space and time, a heroine who is a cross between Indiana Jones and Flash Gordon, a noirish private eye with the soul of a jazz musician, a quest, an alternate Noirish Paris circa the 1950’s that would fit with one of Leo Malet’s Nestor Burma novels, hard science, alien artifacts, augmented humans, real humor, a touching love story, a sacrifice, an adventure, spy thriller, mystery … And yet the book is an homogeneous whole, as simple and perfect as any book you are likely to read, written with the casual elegance of a natural.

   And it all ends on a perfect note embracing both noirish despair and at the same time the hopeful optimism of the most boisterous space opera. This one is what they mean by a tour de force, a perfect blend of several genres that shouldn’t blend at all, but do here with real skill and to great effect.