Robert Reed (1956– ) is an award-winning and exceedingly prolific US writer of science fiction who has written hundreds of short stories and several novels. Highly versatile, Reed in his fiction ranges from intimate vignettes to intricate variations on space opera. As with James Tiptree Jr., intimations of death (and entropy) frequently appear as subtext in his work. His novella “A Billion Eves” won the 2007 Hugo Award, but in general his prolific nature, although matched by quality, has left Reed in the position of being critically underappreciated.
Two sets of connected works have shaped Reed’s later career. In the Veil of Stars sequence—Beyond the Veil of Stars (1994) and Beneath the Gated Sky (1997)—the sense of claustrophobia characteristic of Reed’s work derives from an image of our solar system as impacted upon—from beyond a fabricated and deceitful veil of stars—by innumerable similar inhabited systems. We live in a megalopolis of planets, and we communicate with one another by passing through dimensional barriers, which change our bodies so that we resemble natives of the overcrowded visited world.
The Great Ship sequence—comprising Marrow (2000), Mere (2004), The Well of Stars (2004), the title story of Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas (2012), The Greatship (2013), and The Memory of Sky (2014)—is set on a world ship discovered by humans, seemingly adrift, passengerless and crewless, outside the home galaxy, who take it over, dubbing it Great Ship. The reason for its original construction (many eons earlier), and for its seemingly aimless course through the universe, remains mysterious and undetermined; so large and largely unknown is the ship, even to its new “owners,” that the discovery in the first volume that it is in fact built around an entire planet is shocking.
In an essay about the series, Reed wrote that the initial idea came from thinking about a man living inside “the most perfect spacesuit…built from some marvelous material [and that] functions as a very small, highly competent spaceship.” A second insight years later led to writing the first stories: “A simple realization that the spacesuit was much like a world, self-contained and eternal. I began thinking about more durable types of human beings, people who wore these elaborate ‘lifesuits’ throughout their lives. I saw them as a society. [But] a little spaceship wouldn’t do the trick. I needed something with size, an expansive place where a great culture could be born.”
“The Remoras,” first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1994 (and reprinted in Hartwell and Cramer’s The Space Opera Renaissance, 2006), is a stellar example from the Great Ship/Marrow sequence. It works as an excellent general science fiction story but also as riveting space opera, in a tradition going back to Edmond Hamilton in the 1920s and comparable to the best of Iain M. Banks.