Revelation Space / Alastair Reynolds

 

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm not an enormous fan of “hard" science fiction, which is how I would classify this book. Reynolds was a space scientist first, then a writer. There's an audience for this kind of thing, but it ain't me.

The characters in Revelation Space reminded me of the people in Stephen Donaldson's Gap into… series. All remarkably unlikable. I kept reading this novel to try to figure out the murky motivations behind all the paranoia. Nobody really stands out as less reprehensible, just varying degrees of gray. The aliens of both series are suitably incomprehensible too. They seem to understand humans much better than we understand them. That's well done, as it's difficult to make truly alien characters. Too often they're just humans with unusual features.

Reynolds also seems to take the idea of the malevolent ghost-in-the-machine idea of Arthur Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and push it several steps further. The ship itself is huge, but run by a very small crew, sometimes just by Volnovya alone. However, it is infected by viruses and as a result portions of it have become uninhabitable. There are horror elements here, what with rat janitors by the horde and buckets of ship slime.

I think the aspect that I liked the most was the angle that it explored on the Fermi Paradox. The ancient remains of the Amarantin on the planet of Resurgam are the focus for our exploration of this puzzle and the culmination of things at book's end was satisfying.

I'm giving this 3 stars for the occasional brilliance of the language. I loved the portmanteau “warchive" for the one-stop weapon shop on the ship where most of the action takes place. I also adored the description of the bridgehead, part way into Cerebrus, the artificial planet: “It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets." There are flashes of genius, much as you would expect of a former space scientist.

Book number 415 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.




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