Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

Damn this packs a serious punch for a novella. It has a ridiculous amount going for it.

I loved the set up. The good, the bad and the leftovers of a cosmic war are put on board a prison ship and sent out into the universe without their knowledge. We have bits and pieces from both sides of a massive campaign as well as few who were put in to make the numbers up. Imagine that for a second. You’re a good soldier fighting your ass off and all of a sudden your sentenced to prison to fill an efficiency quota. Then you wake up, with no memory of where you are and how you got there, and all sorts of shit is going wrong.

That’s the situation our protagonist finds herself in within the first few pages of the book and when you have a second to take a breath you’ll find that the ride is just getting started. Scur is a feisty and skilled soldier and a pleasure to follow and she is given an equally menacing and unbalanced big bad to face off against. Done badly this could have wound up with that really cheesy Hollywood feel but the writing brims with quality and scientific nuance. It’s tight and fast paced and just long enough to be satisfying.

This if my first taste Reynolds writing and I can’t wait to try some more. It’s sometimes intimidating getting into an established author that has a sizeable body of work behind them. The thought of finding myself adding too my already huge TBR pile is sometimes enough to give me pause so I am really glad I was given the opportunity to jump in on a small scale. I will probably jump into the Revelation Space series or Poseidon's Children Series as both are three books long and all solidly rated.

Follow Alastair Reynolds on Twitter @AquilaRift

Slow Bullets is published by Tachyon Publications @TachyonPub