The cover’s got this one right.
Halcyon Years is a new noir/science fiction fusion from the author perhaps best known for his books set in the beloved Revelation Space universe.
The first scenes are straight out of classics like The Maltese Falcon. Yuri Gagarin is a private investigator, mainly (badly) dealing with catching cheating spouses and small-time con artists. He regularly has run-ins with the local police, who regard Yuri with some suspicion.
The science fiction element is that this all happens on the Halcyon – a starship, hurtling through space, carrying thousands of passengers, with thousands more sleeping the journey away.
It’s the ultimate in locked room mysteries. Where else can criminals escape to?
Yuri’s hired by a mysterious woman called Ruby Red to look into a death in one of Halcyon’s most elite families, the Urry and the DelRosso. It’s an offer he can’t refuse if he’s to pay his debts, even when he’s warned off the case again by a second mysterious woman called Ruby Blue. Caught between the two, he’s about to be embroiled in a murder mystery in which – at any moment – he could be the latest victim.
He is given a General Systems Servitor to help him with his enquiries, a robot which he names ‘Sputnik’. The only issue is that the robot has been unused for so long that it’s long-term memory is faulty – remind me to update my laptop at some point – which makes Sputnik’s use variable.
Yuri himself is seen as a little bit of a spare part, as he is a ‘Jack’ – a person who has been unfrozen from the cryogenic store known as ‘Sleepy Hollow’ early, added to the spaceship’s living population to broaden the gene pool and so avoid the closed population system from regressing and stagnating over the length of the journey which has taken hundreds of years so far and with more to follow before the ship arrives at its proposed destination, Vanderdecken’s Star.
Yuri is seemingly reassembled from cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, with many of Gagarin’s memories and feelings. As a result, Yuri is generally seen as an outsider who doesn’t belong, He lives sparsely with a rather ramshackle detective agency, at which he initially seems rather bad at. His halting speech does him little favours either. I thought of him as a rather dishevelled space-age Colombo, whose seemingly innocuous questioning actually leads to something more astute.
Along the way we see feuding families, murder, and an element to the plot that hints that all of this may be due to something science-fictional. (Why else would you write such a book?)
Up to this point the story is a murder mystery that wouldn’t seem too out of place as a typical detective story. The thing that changes this is that there’s a major plot development about three-quarters of the way in – a huge, great, bold plot-changer, but based an idea that is firmly science-fictional; the rest of the book deals with this event.
I think that much of your overall enjoyment of the book will hinge on this rather important plot element. I thought that it was clever, if a little incredulous, although even if you feel that it doesn’t quite work for you, there’s enough to enjoy along the way to that point. It may be a case of enjoying the journey, if not the final destination. There’s a lot more to this story than that particular point. As the plot evolves and becomes more complicated, Reynolds also includes ruminations on such weighty matters as life, death, AI intelligence and the importance of identity. He even manages to touch on elements that I think Isaac Asimov and Philip K Dick would be pleased with, although I’m not going to give details here.
In summary, Halcyon Years is a gripping, fast-paced novel that has a lot of fun with literary and genre tropes. This is a classic noir mystery with a science fiction twist, which may keep you guessing, and on the edge of your seat, to the end. Quite enjoyable.
© 2025 Mark Yon
Hardback | Gollancz
HALCYON YEARS by Alastair Reynolds
October 2025 | 326 pages
ISBN: 978-139 9611 763
