British space-opera novelist Alastair Reynolds (@AquilaRift) has a reputation for being a writer of hard sci-fi, based on two facts: first, his day job (when he still needed a day job) was as an astronomer at the European Space Agency; second, his stories often rely on light speed as a key element in the plot.
On The Steel Breeze is about a caravan of spaceships making the journey from Earth to a distant star. They are travelling at something a little over one tenth the speed of light. This is as fast as a solid object can sensibly go before relativistic effects begin to convert it into energy. It is also, in the physics of the story, slightly too fast to be able to stop.
A brief moment of overconfidence in their own abilities has persuaded the travellers to speed their ships beyond their capacity to decelerate, hoping that the shortened journey time will still be long enough for them to invent a better class of engine, capable of doing what their current technology cannot.
Precisely this kind of needless self-sabotage runs through their society, both on caravan and back on Earth: on the caravan we have the Tantors, a race of unusually intelligent elephants capable of understanding basic speech and engineered into existence for no particular reason, being smuggled aboard an interstellar spaceship without telling either the passengers or the Tantors what was happening, or why. On Earth, meanwhile, a system for tracking space debris and examining data from radio telescopes – tasks currently undertaken by NASA without much difficulty and probably soon within the reach of a top-end smartphone – has been secretly handed over to a super-powered artificial intelligence which, perhaps understandably, concludes its only chance for long-term survival is to wipe out mankind before its existence becomes generally known. To this end it begins corrupting the ruling mechanism of Earth, a computer system which controls the majority of mankind and has the power to painlessly euthanise any lawbreakers, apart from a growing minority of former citizens who have re-engineered their own bodies to enable them to breathe underwater, and are building a new civilisation in the sea.
At times, the book reads like a dystopian vision of a society which automatically approves every scientist's request for funding. Since poverty and even natural death have been all but eliminated and there are no longer any nations or religions for people to disagree over, science is everything; even, for the mermen, the solution for there being too much science.
In the background, there exists the possibility of alien life. The caravan’s goal is to investigate some evidence for it but the travellers seem to have no real questions to ask the aliens, if they ever find them. Extra-terrestrial life is longed for simply as something new for science to study, and eventually contain. Just like the quest for a new kind of physics, the aliens are only unknown in their specific details. In their outlines both are clearly understood. The new physics will allow more efficient engines to be built. The aliens will know some facts about the history of the galaxy, and probably have some new technologies to share as well.
Once the aliens are discovered and the new physics are found out, apart from a few holdups caused by rogue AI’s and talking elephants, presumably a new caravan will be needed to travel to the next star, and then (with a new physics) the next galaxy, searching for the next discovery that will enable them to travel even further and faster to the next universe, and the next multiverse, then, when their newest engines have been perfected according to the latest flavour of physics, they can set off on the next great schlep to the nearest of whatever turns out to be the group noun for multiverses.
The labyrinth is the name the travellers give to the strange alien artefact they are travelling towards, made up of canals and gullies carved into the side of a planet. They know it must have been made by an intelligent lifeform because it seems to serve no purpose beyond provoking a desire to be understood, like a giant Sudoku puzzle left hanging in space. Along the way to try and solve it, human life continues, and the book contains a lot of action, love and betrayal. The characters are interesting (particularly the artificial characters) and, although the action is sometimes a little slow, the drama is believable. What is missing is a real purpose, but that seems less like a flaw in the novel, and more like a conclusion of the author.
