SciFi - Alastair Reynolds III

These two stories, in my opinion, were purely for background information about a couple places in Reynolds' futuristic reality.  That being said, they're still both awesome.

Diamond Dogs centers around the Spire - a tower of chambers filled with mathematical puzzles and deadly traps.  One team already wiped and a second sets to trying to work its way to the top and find what is hidden in the final chamber.

Turquoise Days focuses on the Pattern Jugglers, who, whatever they were before, have become an aquatic ambiance of shared memories - forever imprinted below the surface of the warm ocean, and one woman's desire to understand what secrets lie in that sea of memory.

Great novellas with hidden hints linking to other stories.

SciFi - Alastair Reynolds II

Pushing Ice is fantastic!  Imagine if a moon suddenly left its orbit and starting flying off in a direction of an unknown destination...  Imagine you followed it to find out it wasn't a moon at all.

Then imagine something happened and you crashed and were stranded on this marvel of technology (and that it was the cause of that crash).

Then find that you are being pulled into a kind of galactic zoo.  That beings far more advanced and intelligent lured you there, because to them, you're animals - interesting to look at, but unworthy and too undeveloped or advanced to be considered sentient.

How crazy would that be?  And what would you do about it?

This was a very different kind of story.  House of Suns features the shatterlings - innumerable clones of one who wished to explore the universe.  The shatterlings meet every so often to converge with their gathered intelligence.  The latest is that someone or something is trying to wipe them out.

The story centers around a male and female clone who fell in love and are trying to get to the bottom of who is behind this systematic eradication of their people - and why.

To be honest, it's been quite some time since I read Galactic North.  I do remember it is a collection of short stories that are all equally interesting.  The final, I believe, ties into the bigger storyline more directly.

I also recall that one is about a scientist who discovers a frozen asteroid that shows patterns of activity like a giant brain.  All the stories are interesting and thought-provoking.  It's a nice breath of fresh air from the super long and mentally demanding epics that Reynolds fills pages with, usually.  Plus each story gives you another angle, another glimpse of the futuristic reality of his other books.

Century Rain was probably the most different from any of Reynolds' books I've read.

After Earth is rendered uninhabitable by infectious and out of control nanotechnology, two factions bicker and argue over who was responsible.  In the meantime, through one of the numerous wormholes they've discovered, they find, at the end of one, a perfect replica of Earth in the past.

The story follows one agent sent to investigate this planet, and one second-rate detective living on the planet, in Paris. In this book I learned about Amusica - a disorder that renders the idea or comprehension of music impossible to the listener.  I didn't know such a thing existed before, but apparently, rhythm and melody are lost on them.  Crazy, huh?  At any rate, I'll say this - it's unique and the child-like monsters are creepy.

SciFi - Alastair Reynolds I

I think Revelation Space was one of Reynold's first - if not THE first - scifi novels published.  This book alone got me hooked into both the scifi genre, and Alastair Reynolds.

To start, the main character, Dan Sylveste, is a brilliant and arrogant scientist (who you like because he's usually always right), studying a civilization that triggered some galactic trap and was annihilated.

Meanwhile, the crew of a giant light-hugger starship seeks him out to save their captain, who is frozen near absolute zero to halt the melding plague that has affected him.

This story is a dark space opera, chilling, at times dispassionate, but clear about the ramifications of living in a reality where technology is so advanced and necessary for even the most remedial tasks, and artificial intelligence is no longer a fantasy.


Chasm City comes next in the line, and is a complete and total divergence from the first book.  Tanner Mirabel, a trained gunman and mercenary is tracking down the assassin who killed his previous boss, and doing it through places infected by the Melding Plague - which somehow infects both biology and nanotechnology, melding the two into a nightmarish display of death.

This story is faster paced, with more action, but also deepened by Tanner's continuing distraction of memories seemingly not his own, which, as they increase, begin to force him to question his own identity.

This book could easily have been made into a great movie.

Redemption Ark is actually the proper sequel to Revelation Space. Since Sylveste is no longer the main character, a new character arises - Clavain, who was once a Conjoiner (a faction of humans experimenting with the technologically influenced advances in neuroscience, sharing consciousness and rapidly growing intelligence).  But when their advances awakened the Inhibitors, a synthetic alien race bent on wiping out all life (like the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah from Star Control II, or the Reapers from the Mass Effect Trilogy), they decide to hide and let everyone else be wiped out.

Clavain must then flee his former people and forge shaky alliances with untrusting factions to try and save humanity.  There is a ton of information to process in this book, but if you like scifi - you'll thoroughly enjoy it.

Absolution Gap is the conclusion to this Lord of the Rings of scifi epic. The same on-going struggle to understand and survive the Inhibitors and their wolf machines that seek out and destroy star-faring races continues.

But now it ties into a religious fervor-inducing virus and its followers who find ways to watch a planet unblinkingly for as long as possible in hopes to see it flash out of existence.  These occurrences grow,  which tie into an option that may help Clavain and his pig-hybrid ally, Scorpio, stop the Inhibitors.

The only question is, will what they unleash from darker realms of space be preferable or worse than the Inhibitors themselves...