I have to be careful that Futureboy doesn’t become Reynoldsboy, but here is another one by Alastair Reynolds (he just produces reliably good stuff): Published in 2022, Eversion is quite unusual for a science fiction book (and hard to review without giving away key plot twists) in that most of the book appears to be set in recent history rather than in the future.
This book is challenging to review without giving away major parts of the plot. Eversion (I had to look this up on Wikipedia) “eversion is the process of turning a sphere inside out in a three-dimensional space”. There is some actual sphere eversion going on. But just like the eversion of a sphere turns its inside out, eversion - the book - gradually reveals its inner secrets over time.
The story starts – unexpectedly - on a 19th century sailing ship traveling north along the Norwegian cost on an expedition to find a mysterious inlet, harbouring a mysterious structure, the edifice, according to information coming from an earlier expedition, the Europa. Narrated by the sea-sick and mildly opium-addicted ship surgeon, Dr. Coade, we follow the ship’s crew on their expedition. Over the next pages, we witness injury (a poor fellow requires head surgery), friendly banter, nervousness in the face of what’s to come, a strange love-hate relationship between Coade and journalist Ada Cossile, who continues to critique Coade’s use of language (including in a novel he appears to be writing about a steamship expedition) and a mathematician who constantly appears to be walking along the fine line between solving a hairy mathematical problem and plunging deep into insanity. As the crew discovers the passageway into an inlet, they discover the wreck of the Europa and Coade suffers an untimely death.
From here, poor Dr. Coade seems to be stuck in a Groundhog Day scenario as ship surgeon in a procession of increasingly modern vessels – from steamship to starship – always on the search for the edifice, and – it appears – in a doom loop of dying over and over again in a variety of similar but different scenes filled with the same characters (but interestingly told in language fitting the respective time).
While these stories are entertaining and surprisingly little repetitive, there is clearly more to this book is more than just a collection of Dr. Coades adventures. As the book builds up narrative pressure the reader begins to wonder what is really going on, and as Coades begins to remember fragments of earlier versions of himself, a bigger story gradually comes to life, challenging our assumptions about the reality of the book’s universe.
The initially somewhat repetitive story line and the futility of Coades’ efforts may evoke memories of the movie “Source Code” or Peter Cawdron’s book Deja Vu. However, this story is really about something very different: As we begin to understand the true nature of the crew’s expedition and their predicament, the story turns into a (not very subtle) exploration of what it means to be sentient and possibly human. If you feel sentient and act like a human, does that make you both?
In Eversion, Reynolds has written a solid novel. While it doesn’t reach the grand cosmic scale of hos stand-alone book Pushing Ice it is nevertheless an enjoyable read and a timely contribution to a growing body of literature that explores a world where machine intelligences become almost indistinguishable from humans. If something looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, usually we assume it is a duck. What does that make of something (someone?) that sems to think like a human and behave like a human?
Eversion is not a great philosophical treatise, but a worthy addition to the genre.
For a somewhat similar plot structure - an exploration of multiple scenarios stemming from the same initial reality - also check out my review of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh.