Alastair Reynolds has effortlessly produced space operas with a gothic bent and cooler-than cool protagonists. In Pushing Ice, Reynolds tones down the space battles for an intelligent novel of man's future among the stars.

It begins simply: it is discovered that Janus, one of Saturn's many moons, has suddenly departed from its orbit and is flying out of the Solar System. Surface layers begin to fly off Janus, revealing a complex design, and it becomes clear the body was never a natural satellite in the first place, but a machine.

A call is made to the nearby comet-mining spaceship, Rockhopper, to track Janus.

Meanwhile, scientists predict that Janus' destination is Spica, a star 260 light years from Earth. Having placed Rockhopper in Janus' path and beaten a competing Chinese spaceship to the prize, sabotage is discovered. With their chances of safely returning home gone, Rockhopper's crew must accept that the only chance for survival is to attach themselves to Janus and see out the ride to Spica.

The novel becomes a widescreen epic as we follow the humans' attempts to establish a colony on Janus and, eventually, contact alien species. The novel focuses on human responses: to new technology; to strange alien life; and the fact that with time displacement, the rest of Earth will have long forgotten about them. The development of the human colony is largely believable as they employ their outdated technology to meet the challenges of life on Janus.

The author captures the sense of wonder our species has for exploration, making Pushing Ice reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series, to which Pushing Ice can be considered equal.