Eversion

Much of the fun in this vigorous space opera from Reynolds (Terminal World) comes from figuring out the tricks of the twisty plot. Narrator Silas Coade, an anxious young assistant surgeon, starts the novel on a little sloop sailing up the coast of Norway in the 1800s, searching for a fissure in the cliffs said to contain a mysterious “Edifice.” Along the way, Coade dies. But then the same narrator is on a steamship a century later looking for a fissure off the coast of South America. After another death, he’s on a dirigible entering the Hollow Earth through a crater in Antarctica. As Coade struggles with overlapping memories of past expeditions, he slowly realizes that the stories he’s telling obscure the real crisis: an alien space probe has crashed into a subterranean ocean and has captured the human members of a team trying to explore that ocean. The team will all die unless Coade can face a startling truth about himself. Reynolds packs plenty of emotion into this mind-bending plot as Coade struggles to do the right/human thing. The result is an excellent adventure that’s sure to keep readers on their toes. Agent: Robert Kirby, United Agents. (Aug.)