Skip to main content

Revelation Space (SF) - Alastair Reynolds ***

Having recently been hugely impressed by Machine Vendetta, the closing part of Alastair Reynolds' Prefect Dreyfus trilogy, I was delighted to notice in its prelims that these books were set 'within the Revelation Space universe'. I rushed to get a copy of Revelation Space, the first of five novels I hadn't read - and I'm very pleased that I did. One of the interesting things about this book is seeing just how far Reynolds' writing has come on in the near quarter century between the novels.

What we get here is a future universe beautifully conceived with lots of crunchy detail. The science behind it is carefully thought through, and even though the scale of the technology can be overblown, it only feels like fantasy in the final few chapters. Reynolds gives us a complex but well set out plot line and though it's very much in the style where terms are thrown in and you've got go with the flow and work out what they are referring to over time, it never feels bewildering. There are ancient alien remains, political machinations, lots of AI and nanotech wizardry and, though this isn't military SF, enough use of large scale weaponry to satisfy those who like a bit of explosive action.

This sounds like it should be a five star book, and I feel a little mean only giving it three - but there were a couple of reasons that reflect, perhaps, a lack of maturity in Reynolds' writing at this point that made it far less satisfying than his later books. Firstly it's way too long. There's nothing wrong with a long space opera - it's a genre that fits well with the chunky book approach - but there were three separate points in reading  it where it felt like nothing much was progressing for 50 to 100 pages. I just wanted him to get on with things.

The other big issue for me was a lack of character identification. There are three main characters - each rather irritatingly introduced in initially separate interwoven timelines, some of them years apart. I was concerned that I would lose track as we jumped back and forward years, not just at the chapter level where the dates were stated, but also in interior sections without any indication of change of point in time. Even back then, Reynolds was skilled enough for this not to have proved a problem. But despite the three timelines coalescing I continued to find it difficult to feel connected. You might say that this reflects that those three main characters are interestingly written: each as positive and negative points rather than being pure heroes. But in the slow revelation of their motives and interactions, I found it difficult to care about any of them.

My not entirely positive feelings about Revelation Space do nothing to lessen my admiration of this author's books - and after some recovery time I will definitely be moving on to the second in the series. Reynolds is one of our best writers of intelligent space opera, and despite its limitations, Revelation Space remains gloriously imaginative.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...
Post a Comment
Read more