Review of Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds never fails to dream up interesting science-fictional premises, and Slow Bullets is no exception. This novella is creative, tragic, and philosophical—exactly everything I want from my science fiction.

Scur is a grunt soldier fighting in a religious war that just ended. Left for dead by an enemy who tortured her, Scur awakes from hibernation on a prison transport ship that has malfunctioned. She and the other inhabitants of the ship—fellow prisoners from both sides of this war, along with the civilian crew of the vessel—must acclimatize to a new reality, one in which the people they knew and cared for are all long dead. When the damage to the ship threatens to wipe out the eons of knowledge stored within its computers, they come up with a plan to save a sliver of that knowledge on the “slow bullets” implanted within them. What follows is a haunting tale about an awakening new civilization negotiating what survival means beyond the mere basics of food, water, and shelter.

The eponymous concept of slow bullets is fascinating in the way it brings knowledge-keeping full circle. Traditionally, knowledge (and therefore culture) has always been embodied, stored in our meat brains, passed down by teaching one another through oral histories. The advent of writing and, much more recently, digital storage, has provided new mediums for storing our knowledge in spaces beyond our bodies. The slow bullets, then, invert this phenomenon by relocating knowledge within our bodies yet still relying on modern digital technology to retrieve it. This sets up epistemic dilemmas around the idea of truth—throughout the novel, Scur and other characters seem to view the slow bullets as more authoritative than a person’s own testimony when it comes to their identity. So in that way, the slow bullets don’t quite replicate the traditional embodied forms of knowledge-keeping, which required implicit trust in the knowledge keeper themselves, their recall, and their ability to recount and pass on knowledge. I do kind of which Reynolds had interrogated this dimension more, questioned whether the slow bullets themselves were truly so reliable, but I recognize that a novella can only do so much.

Beyond the slow bullets themselves lies more well-explored ideas, such as an incipient society having to form new procedural bodies, mete out justice, etc. Scur’s vendetta against Orvin is an interesting if unevenly paced backdrop plot in all of this. I really liked her solution at the end and was fascinated by my reaction: on one hand, it certainly feels less barbaric than executing him; on the other hand, it still feels cruel? But what other options did they really have? These liminal spaces within a society like this one are fascinating. Often, writers will simply depict a society that has turned into “might makes right,” and I like how Reynolds strives to portray something more nuanced yet no less quixotic and turbulent.

There’s also some interesting albeit shallow commentary on the toxicity of religious schisms here, along with an invitation to ponder what you might think or feel if you wake up and discover your loved ones are all long gone. Slow Bullets doesn’t meditate on either of these topics in much detail—again, novella, not much time—but this shows how carefully Reynolds has layered the conflicts and elements of this world.

A perfect way to pass an afternoon if you want science fiction that pushes you to think while still serving up a fair amount of action.