https://www.alastairreynolds.com/novels/
In which I present the Wikipedia page for Revelation Space in audio, and the stock art fever dream version that “AI” selected for each sentence:
The enduring visuals of Revelation Space are haunting in a lonely quiet way. There are at least 10 years between me and when I read this book, and I couldn’t guess where this series would go, nor Reynolds’ work more broadly in the universe of the same name. Each story I pick up is at first a chore of my own making, with me convinced I would find the book that marked the end of what was good.
It was never so. This trilogy has other sets of completely arresting visuals, and I’ll probably not read another story quite like the third. This first book is meditative, unnerved, leaving us feeling as stranded as every single character on the page. The second teaches us that this series will not be predictable in nearly any element of the previous, but keeps our cast. The third is clown town on ice and it’s astonishing, dark, and lets us see a good deal more of what this universe is like. As it happens, Reynolds recommends these three for getting into the universe, and has some additional words about the rest of the connected books on his site, linked at start.
You will come away from many of Reynolds’ books understanding the set piece that was in them, but Revelation Space’s is a bit more subtle. Nostalgia for Infinity is our home for so long that it becomes the set piece, so large you didn’t understand until you had time to see it properly. But Reynolds has more, as his occasional use of a fourth act to climb out of his premise can be unnerving in its own way. What he adds to his universes can change everything ahead of it, and it is a primary reason why his trilogy can lead you forward.
Revelation Space is anchored in real space and star names, but with cultured titles that have arisen. In this story, unmentioned by the Wikipedia text, Ana Khouri is an ex-soldier who was supposed to wake up from stasis with her husband, but she’s been routed badly, like lost baggage. Time dilation has made sure she will grow old before her husband ever wakes up at the place she should be going. Chasing after him isn’t feasible, as interstellar traffic doesn’t grow on trees. There is virtually no hope of catching a ride to her intended destination. With infuriating lack of closure, she has to give up on him, and be a different person, to play her hand.
She becomes an assassin, as noted by the Wikipedia text, but there is more to draw you into this demented corner of soured space. In a Melding Plague-ruled city on a pretty inhospitable world, thrill seekers resort to hiring assassins against them when nothing else hits the juice anymore. Ana Khouri is ex-military, and while this aspect of her is forced to the background for some time, she is no pushover as she delivers this game to her clients.
When Khouri gets on Nostalgia for Infinity, it is to perform a mission that will further sever her from the shared time context of her husband. Worse, the destination is not on the way to anywhere. When she’s done, she’ll either get lucky and ride away with someone leaving Resurgam, or else she’s coming right back to Yellowstone, barely richer.
She will slip through time now, unsure how to stop. This is her life now, and she has to do it one day at a time on a ship that doesn’t let her sleep during the long slow ramp up to flight speed, and the ramp back down.
The Ultras are those who augmented themselves with abandon, or extensive design. They don’t just contain nanomachinery, they are significantly made of it. The Melding Plague is worst of all for them. Our very sparse crew are Ultras in varying degrees.
However, the Ultras are space-born and frequently like it that way. Thrust gravity is their home, and human-made structures have housed their oxygen in space for a long while. Looking ahead in the story, I won’t forget the way Ilia Volyova observes Resurgam in reverent fear, knowing that her ship could pop its climate for centuries, even by some mistake of thrusters or weapons. A world is a pit of gravity and trouble.
These Ultras are particularly desperate for jobs, as their captain now has the Plague, and all they can do is ice him in his current state and fly to anyone who can help against the one thing nobody can stop. More worrying, the entire crew and trio as a combined acting-captain, the triumvirate, possess a ship that is not fresh. It is hulking and ancient, and not just one kilometer long. Repairs on something this big are a life-changing financial event. Starships are not toys although they sometimes change hands on account of their value and longevity. This one, like most, is a powerful machine that must make money when it goes places, and the rest is up to the crew.
This is all done in setup, and when Reynolds writes it, I felt I could easily go to the universe he wrote about, because he made it real enough to drive the story. A desperate crew and an assassin wanting the same target, and have months to spend in each other’s company until the mild time dilation trip is over. In this universe, time dilation is not a punchline, but a premise. The roads to places are made of it. The value judgement of going to a place looks different, or maybe going at all sounds like a bad idea if the trade politics are bad. Every flight has to count for more than it does to stay put.
I have more to read from Reynolds, but I have consumed quite a bit.
Reasons this story succeeds in my memory of this universe:
Revelation Space is an early-act performance that doesn’t give you a tenth of what the universe is, but has stayed lodged in my memory along with its dramatic starship names. The ships are all but characters in their way, and having spent the time with Nostalgia for Infinity for the trilogy, it is a majestic space whale of a hauler that began here, in decline, but exactly what it needed to be.
Alastair Reynolds delivers something dry but impactful. While not my favorite universe about the Fermi Paradox, it is a favorite universe for bridging dry sci-fi and something untamable and feral that defies our limits. This universe had to start somewhere, with us learning it one word at a time, and I don’t regret any of this book. Aspects of Sylveste’s story make following his pre-Resurgam days harder than it really is, but if this puts you off, rest assured it’s one-off and fitted to this character’s weird backstory. I think of it fondly now with distance.
Every new book I picked from Reynolds in this universe had strong anchors to shared places and terms. The internal consistency is just there, all the time. Khouri comes from a world that could be forgotten after act 1, but that’s not how Reynolds does things. Formative events transpire on many of these worlds, and because the books frequently take place on more than one, the universe is interconnected at many locations and times. However, be prepared for the universe to change direly. His books do not dwell in one magic place. The Glitter Band becomes the Rust Belt, and previously majestic cities become hellish pits of the plague.
The universe of Revelation Space does not sit still, and watching it zig and zag through this universe is a lot of fun. When Reynolds violates dry sci-fi, he does it with a certain reverence on the page, and with consequences.
The Wikipedia text lyrics follow:
Revelation Space begins with three seemingly unrelated narrative strands that merge as the novel progresses. This plot structure is characteristic of many of Reynolds's works.
The first strand centres around Dan Sylveste, beginning in the year 2551. Sylveste is an archaeologist excavating the remains of the long-dead Amarantin race that lived on a planet in the Delta Pavonis system. Over the course of decades, Sylveste learns that the Amarantin may have become technologically sophisticated before their sun destroyed life on the planet Resurgam nearly a million years prior.
The next strand centres around Ilia Volyova aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, a large ship capable of interstellar travel. Volyova and the other members of her skeleton crew wish to find Sylveste because they believe he can help them with their captain, who has been infected with the Melding Plague, a nanotech virus that attacks human cells and machine implants to pervert them into grotesque combinations.
The third strand focuses on Ana Khouri, an assassin living on the planet Yellowstone (in the Epsilon Eridani system). Khouri is hired by a mysterious figure known as the Mademoiselle to assassinate Sylveste.
With help from the Mademoiselle, Khouri infiltrates the crew of the Nostalgia for Infinity as it reaches orbit around Yellowstone, knowing that they will then travel to Resurgam. The Nostalgia for Infinity arrives in orbit around Resurgam in 2566. Desperate to secure Sylveste's expertise to help cure her captain, Volyova and the other two members of the ship's ruling triumvirate (Sajaki and Hegazi) threaten the defenceless Resurgam civilisation, prompting its rulers to turn Sylveste over to them.
Once aboard, however, Sylveste informs the triumvirs that he has antimatter bombs hidden inside the implants in his artificial eyes that could destroy the Nostalgia for Infinity. He then agrees to attempt to cure their captain in exchange for a trip to Cerberus, a mysterious nearby planet orbiting a neutron star that he believes holds the secret to the truth of Amarantin civilisation. They soon discover that Cerberus is actually a massive beacon aimed at alerting a machine sentience of the appearance of new star-faring cultures so that it can destroy them. It is that sentience, Sylveste belatedly realises, that caused the demise of the Amarantin.
