Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (2000/2013 Gollancz
paperback 599pp)
For many years now I’ve seen Alastair Reynolds books on the shelves and avoided looking too closely at them. I’d written them off as bog-standard space opera and the rather plain and boring covers (always a CGI Spaceship and planet on a black background) didn’t help either. Its only after reading a few reviews and recommendations on places like Reddit that I became intrigued. So, when I saw this SF Masterworks edition of his first novel “Revelation Space” (originally published in 2000) available cheap in a Mighty Ape sale last October I picked it up and now I’ve finally actually read it.
The book follows the adventures of three main characters whose connection to each other is not initially clear. Each start out having entire chapters to themselves then suddenly paragraphs within chapters jump about between their viewpoints. Its not until about 150-200 pages in that their stories begin to intertwine and make sense.
We first meet Dan Sylveste in obsessed archaeologist mode. On the near-dead planet Resurgam he’s leading an expedition to dig for artifacts left by the bird-like Amarantim race before they were wiped out in a mysterious event nine hundred thousand years ago. It soon becomes clear that he’s more than a mere researcher – he has become an important political and social figure on the colony world and we follow him over the years as his power waxes and wanes. Events from his past become increasingly important later in the book.
Meanwhile former soldier Ana Khouri has found herself mistakenly transported to the colony of Yellowstone and in its major settlement ‘Chasm City” she has eked out an existence as an assassin who hunts down prey live on a perverse reality show. She is approached by the mysterious “Mademoiselle” and given an important task -killing Dan Sylveste!
Ilia Volyova is part of a crew of ‘Ultras’ – cybernetically enhanced humans who travel between star systems in “Lighthuggers’, enormous spacecraft which approach the speed of light but still take years to reach their destinations. As most of her friends remain in suspended animation, she has to deal with a colleague who has gone mad and a captain succumbing to an alien disease slowly merging him to the ship itself. In an attempt to recruit a new gunner and find help for the captain, her ship heads for Yellowstone and the one person that could help – Dan Sylveste!
A lot happens in the roughly 600 pages of the book, several mysteries are set up – who or what is the entity known as “Sun Stealer”? Why is there a neutrino signal coming from an apparently barren asteroid around a neutron star? What is the secret behind the seemingly inscrutable alien races the “Shrouders” and “Jugglers”? Why aren’t there more civilisations in the Galaxy? And so on. Most are answered in some pretty dense exposition sections.
As this was Reynold’s first novel, I probably shouldn’t be too harsh but the share verbosity of parts of this novel became problematic to me – things that could have been described in paragraphs took chapters. There is an overall coldness about the book, the characters on the whole aren’t very sympathetic and humour is sparse. Having said that I can’t fault the author when it came to ideas, he throws a lot out there and there’s obvious world building for what would become a series that’s still running 20 years later. I enjoyed that part of it but felt like picking up the book was sometime a chore - too much for ‘easy reading’ perhaps. I’m interested and how the subsequent novels worked out and will probably pick them up eventually.
