One can expect to see a Robert Reed short story in any decent science-fiction anthology but I’ve never been a particular fan of his work and I’ve never read any of his longer form writing. Then I read his story Good Mountain in The Very Best of the Best, liked it, realized that it’s part of a wider shared universe and so here I am. This is a compilation of stories about a gigantic ship that roams the galaxy, arranged in rough chronological order. This means however that the stories in here take place very early in the history of the ship while Good Mountain must take place much, much later, so much so that they don’t even feel that they belong in the same world at all. That, sadly, is just one reason why I don’t much care for this book at all.

The Greatship is a gigantic starship that is described as being approximately the size of the planet Uranus. Created by some unknown ancient civilization, the unpowered ship was discovered and claimed by humanity who install their own engines in it and refurbish its vast interior into habitable spaces. The universe teems with intelligent life of all kinds and humans are but one of many starfaring species and not a particularly powerful one at that. After taking control of the Greatship however, humans turn it into an attractive place to live for an uncountably vast number of aliens, as it makes it way through the galaxy, a journey that is scheduled to take 500,000 years. That length of time is fine though as one of the first forms of technology that almost all species develop is effective immortality. This book is a collection of stories, previously published elsewhere, about the many different peoples who live in the Greatship, beginning not long after it was found and claimed by humanity. In between the individual stories are newly-written bridging sections that aim to make the book as a whole a little more coherent.

In addition to all being set within or around the Greatship itself, the stories share some continuity in that there are quite a few recurring characters. A seeming favorite of Reed is the married couple of Quee Lee and Perri who pops up in several of the stories. The former is introduced as an extremely wealthy woman who arrived on the Greatship from Earth itself while the latter is a lovable rogue and explorer with a mysterious past who knows all kinds of secrets about the ship. The power structure and the society composed of the ship’s passengers are also stable throughout the hundreds of thousands of years covered by the stories, except for the very last one in which disaster has befallen the ship. That one, Hatch, actually takes place on the ship’s surface with the diminished community cut off from the interior of the ship and struggling to survive with scarce resources. It’s also one of my favorite stories in this book. Given this, it’s easy to imagine that Good Mountain takes place far further in this future, with the people not even realizing that they are living inside a starship.

The stories feature intrigue, action, adventure, exotic aliens with weird biologies, all elements that I ought to like, but in fact I struggled to complete this book. There are so many things I dislike that it’s hard to decide where to start. Take for example the power structure of the galaxy at large. Despite how it has been repeatedly stated that no polity can dominate the galaxy and how there are all kinds of alien civilizations, somehow all of them respect property rights and use money. The aliens in fact actually pay humans to live on the ship. Then there’s how the technology level on the ship remains more or less static through hundreds of thousands of years. As I noted, they lose technology at one point but they never gain any technology and the technology of the ancients is treated as something that is mysterious and incomprehensible. None of the main characters are ever scientists or researchers. At best they are archeologists and explorers who mine the secrets of the past.

Then there’s how we have all kinds of aliens with very exotic forms and very strange ways of reproducing yet their stories invariably show them to have very human psychologies. There’s an almost Biblical quality in how the old familiar stories of sibling rivalry, jealousy and revenge play out again and again across vast spans of time and space and across no matter how exotic the aliens involved are. Perhaps there are fans of this approach out there, but to me it feels almost offensive in how unimaginative it is and how contrary to the spirit of science-fiction as I envision it. Reed exhibits a kind of fascination for the passing of time here with all of the characters being immortals. Yet this passing of time carries no weight at all, hundreds then thousands then hundreds of thousands of years makes no difference at all, it’s just a number. Things don’t change on the ship, characters don’t change and in fact everything feels a like a great cycle that repeats endlessly.

I’m not even sure why so many want to live on the Greatship. It’s not as if most of the people on it are outward looking and actually interested in what is out there in the galaxy. Instead it feels like these immortals are engaged in idle fancies to stave off dreariness and boredom as much as possible. To me it’s fine to live for leisure and fun, as I’m reading this just after finishing Iain M Banks’ The Player of Games. Unlike Banks’ Culture, it doesn’t feel like Reed considers this kind of life worthy in of itself. Instead there is a kind of Dancers at the End of Time vibe to this as in nothing really matters and the more things change the more they stay the same but we might as well make the most of it.

Anyway the upshot is that this is a book that I actively dislike because it is a kind of science-fiction whose fundamental philosophy is diametrically opposite of mine own. I like the quality of Reed’s writing but I dislike both this premise and his vision of what life in the universe is like. I’m very sorry I ever bought book.