Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is one of the greats of British science fiction. From his Revelation Space series of space operas and the related Prefect Dreyfus crime novels set in the same universe, to his equally epic Poseidon’s Children series. More recently Reynolds has combined classic swashbuckling pirate tropes with space adventure in his Revenger series. Another mash is at play in his latest standalone science fiction novel Halcyon Years – a heady mixture of noir detective and generation ship stories, with a little bit of history thrown in.

Halcyon Years opens with gumshoe Yuri Gagarin trying and failing to capture evidence of a tryst in a seedy bar and ending up getting a beating for his trouble. Enter seemingly femme fatale Ruby Red. She wants Gagarin to investigate the deaths of two children of the wealthiest families in Halcyon. Before long there is another death which Gagarin is arrested. And things only get more complicated from there including being warned off the case by Ruby Red’s sister Ruby Blue.

But this is also a generation ship story. Halcyon itself is a 50km long starship, hundreds of years on a voyage to repopulate on a planet orbiting a nearby star. The population of Halcyon is living in a kind of 1960s world – with cars and telephones, wealthy families and corruption. Gagarin himself is essentially a reboot of the original Russian Cosmonaut. He is known as a Jack-in-the-Box as he is part of a process to randomly bring people out of long-term hibernation into the general population.

As with all great noir fiction, nothing is what it seems initially. The further Gagarin investigates the more he starts to find that the truth is much much more complex than he could have imagined starting out. Luckily along the way he gathers a group of friends and helpers including homeless conspiracy nut Milvus, a robot who he calls Sputnik and a disgraced policeman called Lemmy Litz.

Alastair Reynolds is one of the masters of big idea science fiction and some of the ideas at the centre of Halcyon Years are as big as they come. But these ideas come wrapped neatly in an engaging, trope-aware noir thriller with a delightful cast of characters. So that when things start to get really weird, and they do, readers are likely to be well and truly along for the ride.

Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds

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9.0/10