I’ve been buying Reynolds’s books in first edition as soon as they appear since first coming across one of his stories in Interzone. He occasionally disappoints – but he’s also one of those authors whose works you tend to compare against others in his oeuvre. A novel can be good, but disappointing given what else Reynolds has published. And that’s the case with Halcyon Years (2025, UK).

Halcyon Years is set aboard a generation ship called Halcyon, en route to Vandervecken’s Star. The journey has so far taken around 350 years, but is due to arrive in perhaps a generation. Eight million people live aboard Halcyon, in a society that owes a lot to noir fiction. There is television, telephones, mobsters, corrupt cops, cars… but also a few robots, advanced medical technology… and two families in control of everything. People who die, and can afford it, are frozen, and will be awoken once the destination has been reached. None of it is in the slightest bit convincing – but there’s a reason for that, as the book’s protagonist discovers.

Yuri Gagarin – yes, that Yuri Gagarin – is a private detective. He’s also a “Jack”, a random figure thawed out from the hundreds of thousands in deep freeze. Gagarin, of course, died in 1968, when the jet he was flying crashed, but his presence aboard Halcyon is later explained. He is asked by a mysterious woman to investigate the deaths of the youngest members of the two families which control Halcyon, the DelRossos and the Urrys. One was injured in an accident in a spacesuit while outside the ship, and later died of her injuries; the other died when a “zap-gun” blew up in his face.

It’s in the nature of these types of stories – noir, or California noir – that neither death was as presented, and they are in fact just the tip of a conspiracy, which explains the set-up aboard Halcyon, the faux 1940s milieu, Gagarin’s existence, and various other “clues” which seem to jar. Unfortunately, all this information comes in a long explanation toward the end of the book, when Gagarin and his two confederates have kidnapped three senior members of the DelRosso family and are holding them hostage while they explore what’s outside Halcyon.

I can understand the appeal of wanting to write a noir story in a science-fictional setting, such as aboard a generation ship. And I’m fairly sure noir has been appropriated by science fiction before, although no titles leap to mind. Unfortunately, none of it seems plausible, and if the big reveal makes sense of it all, it’s too late, and too crudely revealed. I’m not sure if totally committing to the mis-en-scène would have made Halcyon Days a better read, but a more elegant way of delivering the big reveal certainly would have done.

Incidentally, I’ve no idea if Reynolds ever read a story called ‘Killing the Dead’, which was published in Postscripts 20/21: Edison’s Frankenstein (2009, UK), but that also featured a generation ship in which dead people were frozen with the intent of waking them once the ship had reached its destination. Yes, I wrote that story.