SF Review; Robert Reed, Marrow (2001)

 Robert Reed’s a bit of a veteran of the short-story branch of Science Fiction, having written about a bazillion of them, and although he seems to have tried his hand at a longer piece before, this is really his first book that has been widely published and given a bit of marketing. Orbit Publishing seemed to market this firmly towards the ‘New Space Opera’ movement, whatever that is, and the recently popular ‘dark’ writings of authors like Alastair Reynolds. Can Reed pull off a big success and transcend the boundaries of sub-sub-genre stagnation? Unfortunately, the answer is largely ‘no.’

What we do get a lot of is Big Ideas. We’re on a vast ship, seemingly with a degree of sentience, in which millions of alien species live, temporarily or otherwise, as high paying tourists on a never ending galactic cruise. Platoons of Captains, who live for indefinate thousands of years, play host to them, led by their Master Captain, an artificially huge woman stuffed full of electronics used for monitoring the ship. There are even a race of vacuum inhabiting mutants, evolved from rogue Captains, clinging to the outside of the hull. It’s all commendably imaginative and large, although not entirely fresh, which makes it even more dissapointing when Reed begins to slip up in his narrative.

Things, naturally, don’t stay calm for very long, and before we’ve even had a proper look at the ship or the central characters they’re diving headlong into disaster. There’s a few more impressive ideas, including his best, a metal enrished biosphere complete with golden trees and ruddy insects, but without the time to catch our breath Reed fails to make the most of these. There isn’t a likable character among the protagonists; the ones I suspect you were supposed to like are too dull to be attractive, and even the ambiguous, manipulative ones are never interesting enough to care about. This renders things a little confusing – why would a group of allegedly strong willed people follow these uninspiring, and too obviously menacing folk? As decades, and sometimes centuries, peel away without heed I found myself plowing through to get to the next Big Idea, empathising or caring about nothing else.

Then there is the prose style.

Reed is obsessed with the one sentence paragraph.

It can, like many structural devices, work wonders if used judiciously, something Reynolds has got right many times in fact. The first few times Reed uses them it sometimes works, or is forgivable, but by the time we furrow into the middle of this lengthy novel he seems to be sticking them pretty much anywhere just for laughs. That I didn’t care about any of the characters, or indeed the ship, and therefore didn’t really care about the element of danger they’re in, these attempts to imbue the narrative with weight just look cynical and, even, embarrasing.

On the plus side, Reed’s writing, when it avoids cliches, is actually quite good. He isn’t very clear when describing fast action, but I suspect he’s just gone a bit too far down the ‘disorientating readers to mirror the confusion of the characters’ road that seems quite fashionable at the moment, so at least he’s trying. Also, as I say, the Big Ideas are very good, and very, very, big, although this does make it more dissapointing when he fails to make the most of them. The ship, for example, while a good idea, only ever feels like a slightly larger version of Babylon 5 or Deep Space Nine. Also, potentially interesting themes like faith and the construction of religious figureheads appear briefly, but flit out of view too quickly to offer any insights. The whole thing is really rather frustrating to read.

Maybe Robert Reed should stick with short stories, they’re probably perfect for his ideas and prose style. In a novel, however, ideas have to be grown to fruition, and drama must come from empathy, not a one-sentence paragraph.