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Sister Alice, by Robert Reed (Orbit Books, 2003, 408p, £6.99)

Space, as we all know, is very, very big. So it isn't surprising that the defining characteristic of the space opera sub-genre is that everything in it is as big as possible. In a properly executed space opera, heroes and villains are larger than life, spaceships are the size of cities and cities the size of planets, empires span galaxies, weapons nonchalantly vaporize planets and suns, and nothing less than the fate of humanity or the universe (or both) is at stake. Space opera had its heyday in the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s, but its epic narratives and widescreen baroque backgrounds have enjoyed an enduring popularity in sf, and in the past decade or so a variety of writers have been refurbishing its tropes with up-to-the-minute science and deploying them in ambitious novels crammed with eclectic exoticism and infused with a vertiginous sense of the vast time spans of cosmological history. Although the New Space Opera is presently dominated by British writers, American author Robert Reed has been mining the same rich seam for more than a decade. In a series of short stories and a related novel, Marrow, he described the struggles for power and enlightenment aboard a spaceship the size of Jupiter cruising through the galaxy; another series of five novellas, first published in Asimov's Science Fiction between November 1993 and September 2000, has been rewritten and stitched together to form his latest novel, Sister Alice.

It's set far in the future, some ten million years after a cataclysmic war threatened to destroy humanity, just as other wars destroyed the thousands of alien civilizations whose remains litter the galaxy. Peace has been maintained ever since by elevation of a thousand carefully selected individuals, the founders of a thousand cloned Families, to godhood by intimate application of technology that gifts them with immortality and every kind of power. The youngest member of one of the Families, Ord Chamberlain, is a child only a few decades old whose powers lie in the remote future, living his long childhood in the family mansion in an enclave of artificial wilderness on ancient, crowded Earth. When one of his oldest sisters, Alice, arrives, Ord becomes the conduit for her confession to an enormous crime: with representatives from most of the thousand Families, Alice was working at the Galactic Core on a project to create a new universe ripe for colonisation, but the project went terribly wrong, and unleashed a wave-front of destruction that's advancing through the galaxy at close to lightspeed. (And also unleashing a plot hole that Reed never resolves: in a universe where faster-than-light travel is impossible, Sister Alice somehow manages to return to Earth from the Galactic core thousands of years ahead of a wave front of destruction that is itself travelling at almost the speed of light. If she broke the light speed barrier we're not told; if she didn't, she should have arrived only a few years ahead of disaster.) Alice is stripped of her powers and imprisoned; Ord escapes his own confinement within the embattled Family estate, and with the help of a brother even older than Alice grows into mature godhood and is set on a quest to assuage the guilt and sorrow of the thousand Families. Meanwhile, in the growing chaos as galactic civilisation begins to break down, Earth is turned into a vast and subtle prison fortress with Alice at its heart, half of the Families, including the Chamberlains, are officially disbanded, and the other half hunt down those rebels who won't relinquish their powers. Chief amongst the rebels is Ord, who must risk revisiting Earth and contacting Alice before he can mount a journey, pursued by two childhood friends, towards the centre of the Galaxy, where an unexpected chance of redemption lies.

Lesser writers would have spun this epic story of fallen gods and their search for redemption into a bloated trilogy, but a good part of Sister Alice's power lies in the economy of its narrative. Reed wastes no time on material that isn't essential to the story, including the tens of thousands of years that pass as characters criss-cross the galaxy just under the speed of light, and there's none of the lush romanticism that bloats so many conventional space opera narratives, no long descriptive passages of landscape, no twenty-page discourses on the plumbing of the Grand Palace of the Vizier of Eternity or the micropolitics of the Space Captains' Guild. As in Marrow, the far future is conveyed in oblique strokes and metaphors that yoke together the bizarre and the familiar: Ord's escape from Earth to Neptune and beyond in the company of his ancient brother is reconfigured as a shamanistic rite-of-passage journey across a prehistoric landscape; a battle to wrest control of a Planck-scale wormhole at the heart of the galaxy is depicted as a chase through the narrowing spiral chambers of a nautilus shell into a winter landscape that nicely recapitulates the fight for a snow fort at that begins the novel.

Reed deploys refurbished tropes of space opera with an elegant economy that's crammed with sense-of-wonder eye-kicks, but there's a chilly affect to his narrative, and it's hard to engage with characters whose concerns grow increasingly ahuman. Although he is careful to begin his narrative from the point-of-view of a character who's essentially childlike and comparatively powerless (although able to casually inflict and receive injuries that would kill ordinary people), his hero's growing powers and the accelerating rush of the story, which toward the end is one great, glorious chase into the heart of the galaxy, increasingly threaten to estrange the reader.

This is always a problem with sf of course. Sf is, after all, a literature of estrangement, a literature whose stories describe extraordinary things happening to extraordinary people in extraordinary landscapes. But in a narrative where trillions can die between one sentence and the next, there's little room for human perspective, apart from a few brief walk-on parts and a single lovely, lyrically sad and shocking passage that depicts the human cost of the experiment's aftermath. Like much literature that deals with superheroes, ordinary people in Sister Alice are mostly reduced to objects to be pitied or rescued, or the faceless components of many-headed, unthinking mobs. It's to Reed's credit, then, that he has woven a steely moral core into his pell-mell narrative. Unlike the crude power fantasies of reflexive science fictional narratives about empowerment, the privileged thousand families of Sister Alice do not rule over the human herd because it is their right. Reed makes it clear that his superheroes are servants of the people who elected them to godhood, which is why they allow themselves to be subjected to common justice and stripped of powers and imprisoned when they break the moral code that first empowered them. Their powers and privileges are not frictionless; the moral equations of the story are not easily balanced. Reed's recent novels and stories are amongst the most ambitious, intelligent and mature of the New Space Opera; Sister Alice, despite its obvious stitching, its plot hole, and its chill surface, is a worthy addition to the canon.

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