SS > SF > book reviews > Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds. The Prefect. Gollancz. 2007

Contents (possible spoilers)

• Great Wall of Mars
• Glacial
• A Spy in Europa
• Weather
• Dilation Sleep
• Grafenwalder's Bestiary
• Nightingale
• Galactic North

It's about 500 years in the future. Humanity has spread to the stars, but still only at the speed of light, although there are rumours of hidden alien FTL drives. People live for hundreds of years, with complex computer implants, and have sub-divided into almost separate species dependent on their upgrades. But the Melding Plague and constant wars mean life is nowhere perfect. Against this backdrop, Dan Sylveste wants to understand what wiped out the alien Amarantin nearly 100,000 years ago. Several factions are trying to help or hinder his progress, and there's more at stake that any can know.

This is a great gritty space opera. The grime and slime, the mysterious alien races, both dead and in the background, the faulty tech, the frozen Captain, the really big guns, the grand and ever-increasing scope of the plot, and the constant revelations and plot twists, make this a great read. One of the back-cover blurbs describes this as "gonzo cybergoth space opera" -- I'm not precisely sure what that means, but I don't think it gives the right impression. This is actually a great example of what Clute calls the "dirty" future of nanotech/biotech, distinguishing it from the previous "clean cut" futuristic worlds (I think "messy" might be a better term, or even "grungy"); the future is more advanced, but the problems, perils and dangers are more advanced, too.

Reynolds gives us a glorious messy background galaxy, and weaves a complex page-turner of a plot across it. Wonderful.

Paragon panel discussion of the 2001 Brits Awards

This is set in the same universe as Revelation Space, a few years earlier. (It actually finishes roughly where the former begins, but that doesn't mean they should be read in the other order.)

Mirabel Tanner is a bodyguard with a mission: to kill the man who killed his employer's wife on Sky's Edge. To start with, this seems relatively simple, but the chase leads him to Chasm City on Yellowstone, a few years after the Melding Plague hit. There he finds his mind unravelling under the influence of a cultist virus, and several people who are not what they initially seem. As he gets closer to his target, he begins to doubt his mission, his memories, and himself.

This is excellent -- equally as good as its predecessor. The scope is not quite so large in one sense, being mainly confined to a single city, but may be even larger in some of the backstory it reveals. The details of the future society -- magically high tech mingling with grungy squalor -- are beautifully drawn, and the complex intertwined plot strands excellently brought together. Marvellous.

We are a few decades after the events of Revelation Space. Sylveste's activities there have drawn the attention of the Inhibitors, with potentially devastating consequences for the whole of humanity. Various factions are trying to prevent, or flee from, these consequences, and all converge on the spaceship Nostalgia for Infinity, and its super-weapons.

This is a stunningly good continuation of the series, with ever more momentous events unfolding, or being foreshadowed, and more in-depth views on the various cultures, from the mysterious hive-mind Conjoiners, to the uplifted pig society in Chasm City, from the Captain plague-melded to his ship, to weapons with attitude. Just as gritty, just as complex and grungy, just as fascinating, and just as satisfying as the previous books, and there's still another one to come!

It's about 20 years after the events of Redemption Ark (although, because we are following several threads, set at quite different times because of speed of light effects, it's not really as simple as that). We pick up the story of Conjoiner Clavain, pig Scorpio, and spaceship Nostalgia for Infinity, and another "parallel" story of mobile cathedrals trundling across Hela, a moon orbiting a planet that occasionally vanishes for a split second. Everyone's stories come together in a final desperate fight against the Inhibitors -- maybe. This is the fourth and final instalment in the Inhibitors saga (the "fifth" book, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, is an infilling of short stories) -- so, of course, all the loose ends are tied up, and all the mysteries explained, aren't they?

Well, no they're not. And that in fact is one of the strengths of the book. Yes, we learn more about the Inhibitors, and what happens in their fight against humanity. But we also learn about a whole bunch of new people, races, galaxies, even universes, some of which may be even worse than the wolves! This conclusion of the large plot, but opening out of the even larger, which has been a feature of the whole series, gives a feeling of reality (for certain idiosyncratic values of "reality", of course). It makes the reader feel they are part of the whole unfolding history, which doesn't come in neatly packaged chuncks with "happy ever afters", and certainly doesn't end (we hope!)