This was a pretty enjoyable narrative that felt a little bit rushed at times and for me, would have benefited from more character development. It tells the story of a group of military convicts who wake up aboard a spaceship only to realise they have been asleep for an awful lot longer than anticipated. The premise is quite simple and not particularly original, but the re-organisation of civilisation aboard the ship was interesting and I liked the idea of the slow bullet as a form of both punishment and tracking. For me though, the narrative just seemed really truncated and this lead to some pretty big leaps in the plot that happened with little or no preamble. It also meant that we weren't given much time to connect with the characters and I felt that more time could have been spent fleshing people out to achieve more impact during the action set pieces. All in all, this was a fun ride, but pretty forgettable.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

Sometime in the future a war is fought where the soldiers have a “bullet” implanted that holds their personnel files as well as a charge that can blow apart their heart. Picture swallowing a thumb drive holding an explosive charge.

Scur is a soldier implanted with a bullet. The ceasefire is ignored by a war criminal and Scur anticipates death. Later on a skip ship, Scur awakes to discover that she is not only not dead but has survived the war. Pard is a ship technician she meets and together they help to determine why Scur and others are on the skip ship and why the skip ship is only partially functional.

The story has some interesting technological aspects as well as a commentary on war and resulting post war behavior.

I recommend the book.

“Slow Bullets” eBook was published in 2015 and was written by Alastair Reynolds (http://www.alastairreynolds.com). Mr. Reynolds has published 15 novels.

I categorize this novel as ‘PG’ because it contains scenes of Violence. The story is set in the far future. The primary character is Scur, a young woman who was conscripted into the military.

Just as the war ended, Scur finds herself in a battle to the death with a vicious enemy. She is severely injured and when she awakens, she finds herself on a prisoner transport ship. She shouldn’t be there, but she is. She finds herself with hundreds of others from both sides. They have been asleep a very long time.

This was an odd, but interesting little science fiction story of only 192 pages. It took less than 3 hours for me to read this novella. It was an interesting plot, though I would have enjoyed another 100 pages or so for it to be flushed out. Cover art is OK. I’m not sure what else they could have used. I give this novel a 3.8 (rounded up to a 4) out of 5.

Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.

My book reviews are also published on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31181778-john-purvis).

Shortly after an intergalactic religious war is ceasefired, this novella's soldier protagonist gets captured by an enemy patrol. The leader of said patrol decides to kill her despite the sudden outbreak of peace because hey, sadism! He also tortures her a bit beforehand just to make it absolutely clear who the antagonist is. She survives, makes it onto a transport, wakes up in orbit around a strange uninhabited planet. The spaceship she is on is failing in interesting if slightly contrived ways. There's a strange stowaway. And of course the antagonist just so happens to be on board, too. Also, plenty of soldiers from both factions with a history of violence.

The setup is plenty intriguing but between dealing with the spaceship, figuring out where (and when) they arrived, sorting out the torturer, re-inventing government, tracking down the stowaway and keeping everyone from just plain murdering each other, there's rather too much for a novella to really handle. The story is narrated as the protagonist's recollection of the distant past which makes it a bit more manageable, jumping over the historically irrelevant bits, but also takes away some of the immediacy of the action.

In the end, it comes in as a perfectly competent novella. Wastes no time in getting going, keeps going until the last page. Characters end up a bit flat, but still decent enough, the ending works, it doesn't quite manage to fully deliver on the potential of the setup, and sometimes it could've punched a little harder, but as a mostly conventional space opera, it does all the things it's supposed to do. And fairly well at that.

Having now read all the 2016 novella Hugo nominees, I have to say that none of them were truly exceptional, but this was clearly the best of the bunch.

Thankfully this is a short story.
As in the title the plot is slow and I just could not relate to the characters.
Give this a miss unless you are desperate for something to read.

If you haven't read a novel of Reynolds before, this is a good story to start with. After that, and if you enjoyed it, bump up to what essentially 'defines' the space opera genre: Revelation Space. Hardcore fans of Reynolds might not find this novella enjoyable as it obviously caters for new audiences, however, it's worth giving it a read if just to marvel once again at the beautiful technologies.

http://satalyte.com.au/2017/03/book-review-alastair-reynolds-slow-bullets/

I received this book on NetGalley and was super excited as Alastair Reynolds has been on my to-read list for so long but I just didn't know where to start. As this is a novella, I felt it would be the perfect introduction to his writing and the description sounded fascinating.

The novella focuses on Scur and her time aboard a prisoner transport vessel. Last she remembered, she had been left for dead by a man called Orvin and so she has now awakened on a transport vessel that is drifting aimlessly through space. The ship contains fighters from both sides of the war, along with some civilians. The three groups must work together in order to figure out where they are and how to get home, if their home still exists. She also discovers that Orvin is also a passenger on the ship, and so must find and deal with him too.

Now, I'm a huge fan of survivalist stories and especially ones set in space, so of course I ended up loving this novella. The characters are great and the concept of a slow bullet - a bullet implanted in you that records your memories and past - is also really intriguing and ends up playing an important role later on.

I would definitely recommend this novella, I felt it was an excellent introduction to the writing of Alastair Reynolds and has definitely made me want to read many more of his books!

Scur is an intriguing protagonist, having been unfairly conscripted to punish her father for his political activities against the regime. She is on her way back home, eager to see her parents and reassure them that despite some of the things she has been forced to do during the war, she is still okay and it isn’t their fault… Only during her homeward journey, she is once more overtaken by circumstances beyond her control and finds herself in a very tricky situation.

The slow bullets of the title are a type of chip implanted deep in the body such they are unable to be removed without killing the recipient, but nevertheless, they can still be read. Details of a person’s life can continue to be fed into its memory, along with images of people who matter in their lives, where they have worked or served. All soldiers have a slow bullet inserted as a matter of course, along with a portion of civilians. And prisoners…

So is someone the sum of what is on their slow bullet? Does that completely encompass who they are and what they are capable of? These are some of the questions behind this engrossing space opera adventure. Scur finds herself in a leadership role, despite not wanting it, because her driving concern is to return home and she cannot see how they are going to do so if she lets the one technical civilian continue to drift, locked in horror when he discovers the enormity of the jam they are in, when things go wrong on the transport ship. That said, he is also the person who manages to solve a whole lot of problems along the way – they probably wouldn’t survive without his input.

As well as raising some interesting issues, Reynolds also provides a real page-turner – over the years I have read one or three space opera adventures and I sort of guessed where this one was going. Until it took a left turn and went in an entirely different direction altogether, leaving me agog and desperate to know how the whole mess was going to pan out. So once the story steps completely over any of my expectations, does Reynolds bring this one to a satisfactory conclusion?

Oh yes. I think this one is going to reverberate around my head for a while, given the unsettling final section. Small wonder Slow Bullets won the Locus Award for Best Novella 2016 and was a nominee for the Hugo Award for Best Novella. Highly recommended.

While I obtained the arc of Slow Bullets from the publisher via NetGalley, this has in no way influenced my unbiased review.
9/10

Not your usual Alastair Reynolds: much shorter and darker. All of the action takes place on a spaceship lost in time ans space and inhabited by a mixture of crew and passengers consisiting of soldiers from both sides of a conflict who have been found guilty - or in some cases not - of war crimes. The ship is slowly losing its memory and the soldiers are forced to use their implanted identification, personnel record and data bank - the Slow Bullets of the title - to preserve as much as they can of human culture. This they attempt to spread through what is left of human colonies which are struggling to survive the transit of an alien race which has lessened the output of suns, It's a bleak tale although essentially hopeful in the end, but although I finished it I did not much enjoy it.

Scur is a soldier who wakes up from deep sleep on a spaceship transporting war criminals and soldiers. She does not know how she got on board, and the last thing she remembers is being captured and tortured by the people she was fighting against. But it is obvious something on the ship has gone wrong, they are not where they are supposed to be, systems are failing, and the crew and passengers have been woken up too soon.

At 192 pages Slow Bullets is a short and sharp sci-fi story. It's intelligent and thoughtful and it kept surprising me. The story itself is nothing new but it didn't go where I expected it to. I picked it up intending to just read the first few pages and found myself reading the whole thing in one go!

Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynoldsslow-bullets
Publisher: Gollancz
Publication date: 16 February 2017

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This review is spoiler free.


My disclaimer here is that I haven't actually read any Alastair Reynolds before, despite him being on my long list of authors I need to look into. Therefore I didn't really know what to expect when I picked up Slow Bullets.

Scur is a soldier who, just as a ceasefire has been declared, is captured by the war criminal Orvin. He shoots a slow bullet under her skin, a routine procedure that usually requires an unconcious patient or at least an anaesthetic. Rather than working its way into her chest where it would painlessly remain, this bullet will dig an excruciating and ruthless path through her body and into her heart, where it will explode. She is rescued just as she loses consciousness and when she awakens, she finds herself on a drifting prison ship that hasn't quite arrived at its designated time. Trapped on the dying ship with criminals and civilians from both sides of the war, Scur and the others must set aside deeply ingrained differences in order to survive and build a community. But unknown factors disrupt the fragile peace and new priorities begin to take hold.

I have a lot of feelings about this novella. First of all, a decision should have been made to either expand this into a full-length novel or trim a lot of the fat and flesh out the story and characters. There's just so much crammed in here and it would have been more effective to follow a more simple plotline. Many of the extra bits just didn't feel as necessary -- some things that would be more developed in a full-length book were mentioned once or twice and never again. A lot of this was fluff; it was adding action for the sake of action. The best parts of the book were when we could study the behaviour of the people on the ship and how they reacted to a range of hopeless and difficult situations.

Despite plot issues, the writing is fantastic and engaging. Reynolds does an excellent job of creating an underlying tension and sense of despair that permeates the novella. While the world building is minimal, Scur, Prad, and Orvin are all interesting characters that help drive the reader's interest. Scur is our narrator, but is she reliable? We cannot be sure even though we get a firsthand account of the events through her. She says she doesn't want leadership, only revenge, but assumes a leadership role anyway. Prad follows her lead too easily, particularly toward the end, but he's supposed to be an innocent crew member fleeing from dangerous soldiers. Orvin is a terrible, terrible human, but is there something he knows that we don't about our narrator? Maybe I read too much into it, but these characters all seem to be and want more than they appear, and I would have loved to see them fully developed in a novel.

A lot of this sounds so negative, but it really is a fun read. The good stuff is there in Slow Bullets, but some of it got sacrified for 'action' and filler. There's a level of depth here that works so beautifully in sci-fi; science fiction is at its absolute best when it breaks down society and examines what it is to be human. Overall, this is a quick and satisfying read that's absolutely worth picking up. I feel I was harsh on a good novella because it had the potential to be so much more.

Rating: 3.5/5

Slow Bullets is a quick read that I think I would have enjoyed more had it been fleshed out further. Note that there may be some slight unmarked spoilers ahead!

*****spoilers*****

The story follows Scur, a solider in a future war of religion. She winds up on a sleeper ship and wakes up to find that something went wrong...

In typical Reynolds fashion, the mystery unfolds gradually and with the occasional revelatory discourse. I'd say that, generally speaking, the prose wasn't quite as polished as his usual work. That may actually have been intentional with the first person perspective though, it's hard to say. Scur was a little more than she seemed, but I never really came to understand why she did things the way she did. Her actions were reasonable but I didn't have a good sense of why she was more conciliatory than others. Maybe that's why her upbringing was so important, including her parents' reading of a poet from the other side? Tough to say.

I did like the ideas at play; the skip drive, slow bullets, hibernation malfunction. I wasn't crazy about the generally nihilistic tone, which uncharacteristically seemed to end on an upbeat note. But I did particularly like how he approached the theme of redemption, I thought he did an interesting thing by giving the "bad guy" a chance to help a whole world leap ahead, and that he left it open ended.

Overall, I'd only recommend this book to someone looking for an Alastair Reynolds fix between his other releases. I'd literally recommend any other writing by him before this. So, I thought it was good hard sci fi but not as good as some of Reynolds's other short stories with similar plots.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

his my first book by this Author and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the characters and the setting .
Being an ardent fan of David Weber and after reading this synopsis I was expecting a Space Opera along similar lines ..... but this is totally different .

A vast war encompassing hundreds of worlds has reached a cease fire agreement - but not for Scur .
She has been captured by Orvin , a war criminal, who leaves her for dead after torturing her .
We leap forward to Scur wakening aboard a prison ship orbiting a frozen planet . Something has gone terribly wrong -what is she doing on board the ship ? where are they ? when are they ? and what is happening to the ship ??
With prisoners from both sides of the war awakening from hibernation to an uncertain situation, chaos is imminent . All sides must put their differences aside and pull together to survive .

This is a well written fast paced book - covering isolation, and the will to survive at all costs .
Having enjoyed this book - I will look for others by this Author .
I was given an Arc of this book in return for an honest review

So much promise for the first 2/3 of this, and I was completely let down at the end. We follow Scur and her path throughout a war that she never intended of being apart of, to being stuck in a prisoner transport vessel.

I love the concept of being stuck-out-of-time and not knowing what is really happening to you. Scur, and the other people stuck in the same predicament as her, react as well as you could expect some would.

The first 2/3’s of Slow Bullet effectively show how humanity and make ends meet even in the most dire of situations, but once all this amazing plot development occurred, for me at least, it was all lost in a few sentences. Others may enjoy this twist, but it felt like Reynolds wanted wrap things up quickly and unfortunately he did not give it the care and attention that the rest of the book got.

This may be the right book for some people who enjoy books that leave you wondering what will happen once you have read the last word.

Slow Bullets is the second book by Alastair Reynolds that I have read, it was only 192 pages, but it was 192 pages of yet another brilliant space opera by the master. This novella took place in an alternate world to ours and mostly in space; there is one main character Scureyla or Scur as she is known throughout the novella. The novella reads a lot like a memoir rather than a story with the narrator Scur bringing you back to various points in her life as a forcibly conscripted military individual on her home planet.

The story starts with a brief mention of a broken law in the form of poetry before it is moved on to the actual story, where Scur is captured during a ceasefire by the war criminal Orvin who ultimately tortures and comes very close to killing her. From there things get more space opera-ery and less horror movie; Scur reawakens after passing out on a skipship (a type of transport vessel) that is now a prison, she’s been in hibernation for the past god knows how long and the world around her is not how it once was.

There was multiple sides to the war and these sides have spilled over into the prison ship the Caprice and everyone is fighting amongst each other in fear. Scur comes across a member of the crew named Prad who she eventually befriends after some rather jumpy starts; together they start to put the deteriorating ship to rights including separating out the three ‘factions’ of the war.

"We do not choose our friends in life; life does that for us."

There’s a bit that’s slightly harsher than I would have expected given how “generic” it seemed at the start but there was a sweet little twist towards the end that threw me entirely. Orvin didn’t die 1000 years ago like Scur thought, instead he was with her on the Caprice and the twist relates to him – that’s all I’m saying.

There’s a strong religious undertone to this novella which was a touch off-putting, particularly with the eventual mini religious war that ensues between the factions. This book has been previously published and it has been mentioned a few times that it’s quite generic, to begin with it is, but the ending of this novella is what makes the entire thing brilliant.

"Until then, whoever I was, whatever I did, whoever you are, think well of me.

I called myself Scur. I was a soldier in the war.

I set my hands to these words."

It was certainly a good slice of Alastair Reynolds work and was definitely written along the same lines of the other book of his I’ve read Revenger, although short and sweet, there were no loose ends that can sometimes be present, the dialogue was a touch mis-matched but was ultimately well-rounded and proved a good thing.