Title: PUSHING ICE
Author: Alastair Reynolds
ISBN: 0575078154
Publisher: Gollancz
Pages: 514
Reviewed By: Adam Donnison

The economic need for more resources than the earth has to offer has required ships like Bella Lind's Rockhopper to hook rockets up to asteroids and comets and ship them into earth orbit for extraction of their precious resources. Pushing Ice, they call it, and this is the last piece of ice Bella and her crew will need to push before this rotation is over.

When Saturn's ice moon Janus changes its orbit and starts to head out of the solar system, accelerating all the way, Rockhopper is the only ship close enough to catch up with it. The potential windfall of finding out the secrets of this obviously alien artifact are not lost of the company and Rockhopper is sent to chase. The ship, and its crew, is pushed to the limits and in some cases beyond when Janus starts to prove much stranger than it first appeared.

PUSHING ICE was hard to put down. Well written with a pacy style it grabs the readers attention and doesn't let go. Like all good hard science fiction this is based on solid science, and the speculation is very believable. The science doesn't get in the way, though, and is introduced in such a way that even the novice will enjoy the ride.

Central to this book are Bella Lind and Svetlana Barseghian, both strong women who start out as solid friends. The changing nature of their relationship pervades PUSHING ICE and almost every incident is impacted upon, or initiated by the shifting allegiances surrounding the pair. I would have liked the focus to be a bit wider at times. This, and other minor inconsistencies that troubled me should not detract from what is, after all, space opera in grand style.