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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more