Back in June I wrote a little post about alien megastructures in science fiction. It's a subgenre I really enjoy the idea of, and I've been keen to explore more of it (though I haven't made much of an effort to actually do that). Alastair Reynolds still remains my gold standard for this sort of thing, so when I learned about the existence of Troika I knew I was going to have to bump it to the top of my reading list immediately. 

This short novella is everything great about Reynolds' writing distilled down to 100 pages. We've got weird far future tech, "hard" science that's still fun to read for someone with no science background and a head that actively resists maths, complex characters, a plot that spans centuries (or possibly millenia), and a surprising ending. Reynolds is really good at describing alien things in a way that emphasises the weirdness but still grounds them in reality, and that's on full display here. 

Something I've become increasingly interested in during my Discworld read-through is watching writers try out the same ideas from different angles in subsequent work. Here we see some of the same ideas that he'd used in Pushing Ice a few years earlier, but we also see the seed of some of the stuff that ends up in the Revenger trilogy. The object the protagonists explore - the Matryoshka - bears some resemblence to the baubles from that series, particularly in the idea of the shifting limited time window for accessing them. Without wanting to give any spoilers for either this or Revenger, the ending of that series also seems to echo the end of Troika. 

This is a really great entry into the megastructures subgenre that I think deserves more attention.