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...