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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here