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 This is one I thought I`d like a lot. I didn't. Confusing, wandering, promising much more than it delivered, what this book needed was a decent editor. It's also full of cynical, monomanical characters and too-cute-for-words dialogue (a regretable trend in much sci-fi these days). The ending is merely silly. Where are you Vernor Vinge?
And it almost is - but not quite. The plot itself is fine, as far as it goes - an obsessed scientist who rules (badly) a feeble backwater colony is first deposed by his subjects and then abducted by a starship crew who need his technological expertise to cure their Captain of a strange nanotechnological disease; in return, he demands that they transport him to a strange moon that seems to hold the secret to the mysterious demise of an ancient alien civilization. This summary is hardly more than a thumbnail sketch. The motion of the plot is, at times, as dense as the neutron star that figures prominently in the novel; and the scope is as widescreen as one could wish, careering anarchically between worlds and centuries. But the fun, the spontaneity, is absent. It feels like Reynolds is going through the motions, like he's reduced the modern baroque space opera to its component bits and is merely dutifully and rather joylessly reassembling them. At first it's hard to pin down exactly where REVELATION SPACE falters, because so much of it works quite well. While Reynolds, a practicing astronomer, lacks the focused, laserlike literary brilliance of a Gene Wolfe or a Michael Swanwick, neither is his prose colorless and oatmeal-bland (as happens all too often to scientists-turned-writers). In fact, he's quite witty, and, in the tradition of British SF, his writing has an entertainingly cynical edge to it - it doesn't fall prey to the cheesy over-earnestness that afflicts many American hard-sf writers. The flaw, I think, lies in the characters. It's obvious both from his writing and from his public comments that Reynolds is well-versed in the history of the space opera and has concluded (correctly) that the problem with a lot of the genre's supposed classics lies in their bland, white-bread, Heinleinian "competent-man" heroes. But Reynolds' characters are just as flimsy; it's just that he's given them motivations that are more perverse or arcane than the norm. Like the "competent men" before them, they tend to be defined more by their disciplines (the soldier, the scientist, the engineer, the captain, et al) than by their actions and personalities. REVELATION SPACE's other main affliction is one common to sf - too much exposition. In fact, EXPOSITION SPACE is a far more accurate title, as little in the book feels like a revelation. One of the big draws of this sort of novel is the much-discussed and ever-elusive "sense of wonder" - and while Reynolds reaches for it over and over again, stretching his story to fit bigger and bigger canvases, he murders it with the cement overshoes of needless verbiage and explication. I think HYPERION is so fondly remembered by sf fans in part because Dan Simmons, originally a horror writer, understood that the sense of wonder is best achieved by the strange, the half-glimpsed, the dreamy and the irrational, not by the thoroughly- and conscientiously-explained. REVELATION SPACE is a difficult book to form a coherent opinion about, because there's much here to like; but ultimately it falls into the category of "interesting failure." That said, as it's Reynolds' first novel, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially as the general consensus seems to be that his subsequent novels are far superior.
Three threads converge: on the planet Resurgam (of the sun Delta Pavonis), Dan Sylveste is studying the relics of the long vanished natives called the Amarantin, while resisting moves to terraform. On Sylveste's former home planet, Yellowstone, Ana Khouri is a professional assassin, recruited by the mysterious woman called the Mademoiselle, for a rather different assassination. At the same time (accounting for STL travel time) Ilia Volyova is approaching Yellowstone, looking for help for her ship's Captain, who has succumbed to the "melding plague", which seems to cause him to be combined with nearby machines, such as the ship, and also looking for a new gunnery expert, after the previous one succumbed to insanity upon being invaded by an intelligence called "Sun-Stealer". Before long Ana Khouri is the new gunnery recruit -- by accident the spaceship and the Mademoiselle share the same goal -- Dan Sylveste. The spaceship needs his surgical skills (or more precisely, those of his father Calvin, who "lives" on as a computer simulation which Dan can host), while the Mademoiselle, for mysterious reasons which we slowly guess, wants to kill him. All the threads converge at a neutron star companion of Delta Pavonis, or more properly, at the very strange planet orbiting the neutron star. Among the neat ideas introduced are the odd aliens called the Pattern Jugglers, and more odd aliens called the Shrouders; as well as a scary explanation for Fermi's Paradox, as well as the secret of the Amarantin, and of Dan's past. All these are well-handled, and resolved rather fairly and interestingly. On the other hand, the characters almost completely fail to come to life. For instance, some way through the book we are told that Dan Sylveste and another important character are in love and are to be married. My first reaction was "What?" -- and even after their marriage and several tender scenes, I was simply not convinced. Too, the narrative voices of the three POV characters tended to merge. Another problem is pacing -- the book is far too long. It would have been better if it started about halfway through, with maybe a flashback or two. Still, though it's not a perfect book by any means, it's a worthwhile debut, and there is no doubt that Reynolds' SFnal imagination is as good as anyone's. He's a writer to watch. |
Reynolds provides an engrossing, fast-paced tale that keeps you reading through the nearly 600 pages. The plot twists are labarynthine but for the most part remain believable. The characters have the typical post-modern combination of likeable and not-so-likeable traits that have the reader cheering them on at one moment and recoiling from them at another. There's certainly no lack of imagination here, as Reynolds brings together exotic astrophysics, cybernetics, and literature in a engaging blend of enjoyable SF.
Alastair Reynolds has produced an amazing masterpiece (an incredible debut!) blending the extrapolations of hard science with unforgettable characters set in a possible and disturbing future five centuries from now. This is a thinking person's novel, not light reading to be finished overnight. The conceptions from nanotechnology, astrophysics, genetic engineering, and computer science will stimulate you and keep you thinking long after finishing the book. It is so well written, that despite its length I was left wishing it would continue for a few hundred pages more. The vast panorama of intergalactic history and conflict, spanning billions of years, and the original ideas the author presents establish him as one of the most powerful voices of modern science fiction, in the tradition of Arthur Clarke, A.E. van Vogt, Jack Williamson, and a few others. Although the power of this novel emerges primarily from the dizzying vistas of the future and the alien artifacts and civilizations it paints in cataclysmic brush strokes, it also features outstanding characters not easily forgotten: Khouri, the soldier assassin, and Ilia Volyova, the dynamic Triumvir on the starship Infinity, are easily two of the strongest female characters in sf literature, and the pathos of Dan Sylveste will long linger in memory as well. This novel is a first rate masterpiece of the calibre of Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END, Williamson & Gunn's STAR BRIDGE, and A.E. van Vogt's VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE. Highly recommended!
After more-or-less neglecting mainstream science fiction for a couple of years, I picked up REVELATION SPACE both because I'd enjoyed Alastair Reynolds' short fiction and because, based on what I'd heard about it, the novel was a spiritual heir to the plot-heavy, widescreen, and irrepressibly fun space-operatic epics of Dan Simmons (HYPERION) and Vernor Vinge (A FIRE UPON THE DEEP).
