Doctor Silas Coade is passingly happy with his novel in progress, and the steamship Demeter has made safe passage through the fissure in Patagonian cliffs to find the lagoon – and the imposing Edifice on its shore – that Topolsky assured them awaited.

Just as I settled into the characters and their relationships, the narrative reset. The overall impression is of a mild man who knows where he wishes to end up and is struggling to get there. Mortlock and the crew are hanging out for the next chapter Milady Cossile has nothing but criticism, which she likes to think is constructive, but which is beginning to discourage the doctor. In his off-hours, he is writing a fanciful romance of steam-powered vessels and flying machines, which he reads to the officers in an evening. Yet he takes a quiet pride that he has been up to the medical challenges of the expedition so far – for he is only an assistant surgeon, saving costs for Topolsky and granting him a chance to test and enhance his skills before settling down safely ashore. He concedes he has an opium habit that he conceals from the crew and admits that his desire to turn for home makes him a coward. There’s a fine old-fashioned tone to the prose, capturing the opium-sniffing doctor’s manner and class and I enjoyed that just as Coade talks down to affable midshipman Mortlock, he gets his own intellectual ass handed to him by smug Milady Cossile, the only woman aboard.Ĭoade is disarmingly honest with himself. The expedition has been sponsored by arrogant Topolsky, a wealthy Russian with an expansive ego and a disdain for the sound of others’ voices. We join Doctor Silas Coade aboard the fifth-rate sloop Demeter, sailing north up the Norwegian coast in search of an uncharted fissure in the cliffs that conceals a lagoon. The result is a neat puzzle box of a narrative, but if – like me – you don’t get a lot of mileage out of the setting and influences it so adeptly channels, you may not find it particularly engaging either. I would characterise it as an homage to classic and pulp adventure fiction with an SFnal twist more steampunk than Gothic although it is often creepy, embracing elements of psychological and physical horror. As questions gather about what happened to the first ship to find it, the expedition’s doctor begins to recall events his crewmates assure him haven’t happened…Įversion is a new stand-alone novel by Alastair Reynolds billed as an SFnal Gothic thriller set in cold climates, with hints of parallel timelines or a locked time loop. An arrogant foreigner funds an expedition north – or perhaps south – or maybe out – to find a mysterious Edifice that appears on no charts.

Eversion alastair reynolds review