re:mote voices

Title: Marrow
Author: Robert Reed
Publisher:Orbit

A massive spaceship appears from what is thought to be empty space, the first to board it are humans. On boarding the colossal ship, they find it to be deserted, with no clue as to where it came from. The ship is taken over, and it is decided to make it a galactic cruise ship, run by an elite crew of captains. The status quo is maintained for thousands of years, until one of the ship’s mysteries is revealed – at it’s heart, deep in the core of the ship a planet is hidden. The top captains are selected to go down to this planet and investigate it, unfortunately they set off an electro magnetic pulse, which wipes out all their technology and traps them. Expectations revolve around the idea that someone will come and rescue them, but as the centuries pass the long-lived captains are forced to accept they are going to have to save themselves. This sees them start to recreate technology from scratch as well as a breeding program. The result has something of Lord Of The Flies to it, the Loyalists being the original captains, dedicated to survival and a return to the Ship, while the Waywards believe that they are the original builders reborn, and take to living wild in the expanses of the planet which has been given the name Marrow.

Robert Reed again works on a cosmic scale, following characters that are pretty much immortal, living lives on a scale almost beyond our imaginations. Unlike Sister Alice which I covered here recently Marrow has a more grounded feel – the course of the narrative really covering two locations – that of the ship and of the planet Marrow lying within the ship. In terms of characters, the narrative tends towards alternating between Miocene and Washen, though there are points where other points of view do come into play. Miocene is the second in command to the Master of the ship, strict, severe, unimaginative, but determined to return to the ship no matter what. Washen on the other hand was born on the ship, unlike Miocene who was one of the first to board the ship, younger and more of a people person, more adaptable to the situation.

There are points where the seemingly endless years on Marrow feel as though they may be going on a little. But the lead up to there works, and once momentum starts building up towards a possible return to the ship, and an understanding of what might have happened to explain why they were never rescued, then the book starts to propel itself forward at a greater speed.