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Marrow, by Robert Reed (Tor, $25.95).

Science fiction's trademarks are, ostensibly, novelty, the shock of the new, the explication and elaboration of radical ideas and bleeding edge science. But it is also a genre in which authors build careers on sequels, extended trilogies and series, in which familiarity breeds trademark recognition rather than contempt. And so, paradoxically, science fiction writers who are cursed by the need to do something different every time often don't get the recognition they deserve. Robert Reed, author of eight novels of which only two (in a series, begun in 1994 and as yet uncompleted) are in any way similar in theme or setting, is a prime example of this paradox, but now he's delivered a novel which, by cleverly trading on the familiarity of the tropes it reshapes yet delivering a frisson of genuine strangeness on virtually every page, should elevate him to the ranks of the very best writers in the genre

Marrow expands one of a clutch of recent stories set in a vast spaceship built by enigmatic aliens and crewed by near immortal humans which is engaged in a slower- than-light tour of the Galaxy, a space opera that, although perversely set almost entirely inside the spaceship in question, is nonetheless genuinely epic in the very best traditions of classic sf. The Great Ship, a big, not-so-dumb object ten times the size of Jupiter, is honeycombed with labyrinthine passages, seas, hollow habitats, anthill cities, moon-sized motors, oceans of liquid hydrogen fuel, and much else. Its origin and purpose (and apparent intelligence) are unknown to the humans who salvaged it and, having turned it into a commercial liner, now comprise its near-immortal crew. There are thousands of captains, each a hero in his or her own right, under the command of the ship's Master; there is a race of posthuman Remora who maintain the outside of the hull, where they have built domed cities straight off the covers of 1940's pulp magazines; there are billions of alien and human short- and long-term passengers. It is a place ripe with Story, and at the heart of this great construct is a mystery: Marrow, a violent world of iron and earthquakes and volcanoes, the place where the riddles of the Great Ship's origin and purpose may be answered.

A group of captains sent to explore Marrow are marooned when the bridge they have built to reach the world is broken, and the passageway they have bored through the cold iron surrounding it is sealed. They take five thousand years to build a civilisation advanced enough to escape the trap, meanwhile discovering that Marrow slowly expands and contracts like a great heart, and that something -- either the Great Ship's Builders or their mortal enemy -- may inhabit the centre of the world at the centre of their Great Ship.

Marrow's exiles split early on between the Loyalists, led by Miocene, a cold and ruthless Submaster, and the wild Waywards, led by Miocene's son, who believes he has been vousached a vision by the Builders. When at last the way back into the main part of the ship is rebuilt, Miocene leads a revolution against the Great Ship's Master, but is challenged by her son, leader of an army of billions of fanatic Waywards. It is left to Washen, a relatively young but brilliant captain, allied with a colourful renegade, to try to win back the ship. Reed elegantly refurbishes the well-worn tropes of his story -- a vast and ancient artifact left by mysterious, god- like aliens; shipwreck on a hostile planet; humans stumbling all unknowing into a plot greater than they can imagine -- and conveys an authentically chilly sense of posthuman estrangement. A century can pass in a sentence, millennia between chapters, and characters whose bodies can be repaired and regrown by artificial survival genes inflict upon themselves and others tortures and mutilations as terrible as any to be found in the most bloody grand guignol. Miocene keeps the severed heads of her enemies, alive but slowly desiccating, as ghastly trophies; a stowaway seals himself within a tunnel of carbonaceous tar and incinerates his body, because reincarnation is his only hope of reaching the Great Ship; the menu of a funeral feast: . . . was borrowed from a species of cold deep-space aliens. The captains destroyed their mouths with a ritualistic bite of a methane-ice fruit.

This twist on the classic theme of immortality, intricately elaborated into a society as structured and bound by ritual as dynastic China, is typical of the ingenuity of Reed's seamless and ambitious feat of world building. Rich in genre echoes, casually encompassing the vast expanses of space and time which are sf's native habitat, *Marrow* is an extraordinary and extraordinarily intelligent novel stuffed with wonder and wit.

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