Available in the collections, Beyond the Aquila Rift, Zima Blue and Other Stories and the anthology, Love, Death Robots: Volume One.

Another one of Alastairs moments playing with life suspension while in space flight.   For those who have read all of the Revelation Space series you'll know that this can cause really fucked up dreams and states of mind when you're coming back out of suspension.   Mix this state of mind with a spacers' rumour that one day you'll go so far you'll end up beyond the Aquila Rift and you can really get a good head fuck going: with a nice twist at the end as well.

And the next book in Alastair's publishing order will be Zima Blue. ( )

This is a really nicely done short, making very effective use of compression and mood.

Humans have colonized "the Bubble," the local region of our arm of the Milky Way, relatively free of dust. They've done it using a network of FTL travel gateways left behind by some ancient space-faring species they know nothing about except that they left this network behind. Humans have learned how to use, but don't fully understand it or the principles on which it works--so sometimes, things go wrong. Ships wind up somewhere other than where they expected to go, and the crew is just stuck with the problem of getting home again. Depending on how far off course that is, that might take days, or weeks, or months.

Or years.

The captain of the Blue Goose is awakened from his surge tank to find that he's not where he expected. How far off course is he? A familiar face, an old lover, Greta, hedges for a while but eventually tells him he's weeks out of his way. Once his ship is repaired, and he and his crew can make their way home, they'll be at least forty days behind their scheduled arrival date. It's upsetting, but it's a risk every spacer crew takes.

And then he starts to notice little discrepancies. Where is he really? And why was Greta here to meet him, rather than some random stranger?

It's a really compelling story which delivers a nice punch at the end.

Recommended.

I borrowed this story from a friend. ( )

‘Aquila Rift’ calls to mind another Reynolds story “Pushing Ice” or Frederick Pohl’s “Gateway” with its plot device- an unreliable alien FTL technology backfiring. Each of those novels are both much longer, and therefore more satisfying to those who found this story disappointingly short. One particular strength here, however, is the well researched and described stellar geography of our 'local bubble’ within the Milky Way- exactly what one would expect from a former ESA research astronomer.

I have to agree that the short length makes the audio format suffer- it would be better offered as part of a collection or anthology edition, and not as this stand alone offering. Also, an awkward musical sample plays between certain scenes in what I imagine are the author’s narrative break points. I found it quite distracting, and each was overly long- several seconds each. They made me wonder if they were struggling to expand the final time length. At just over an hour, it isn’t worth spending an Audible credit on, but for Reynolds fans, it would definitely be worth a cash purchase. ( )

Thom is captain of the Blue Goose, an ordinary cargo ship that routinely uses the network of discarded alien jump gates to get around a volume of space that includes Earth. For this jump though, things go wrong for Thom in small ways and then in more significant ways. A delightfully Dickian tale of increasing estrangements... ( )

A hyperspace jump goes wrong and leaves a ship captain stranded on a distant station. ( )