On the Steel Breeze by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
We start two hundred years after the events of Blue Remembered Earth, and the action here extends over roughly a century,
so already there is a sense that this is a work on a different scale to what went before. But in a
sense the timespan is the most homely part of the novel, because along the way we encounter caravans of hollowed-out asteroids
each with ten million passengers, alien constructs a thousand kilometres long, curiously casual journeys that are years in
length, and more. The novel teems with inventions that seem designed primarily to emphasise the smallness of humankind.
Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
The first thing to be said about this novel is that the plot is nonsense. Engaging nonsense,
carried off with a great deal of panache, but nonsense nevertheless. The two central characters are sent
dashing hither and thither across the solar system to find buried plot tokens that have been hidden decades
before and yet whose discovery is somehow urgent for the immediate well-being of humanity.
Of course, the things have been hidden so long that recovery has become filled with peril.
Troika by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
There are two significant science fictional inventions here, either of which would justify a book in its
own right. One is a big dumb object: a technological curiosity that hangs in space like a monumental question mark. The penetration and
exploration of this object provides the main science fictional drive of the story.
But it is the second invention, a low key political scenario, that holds the book together and leaves you
wanting more.
The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds
an audiobook review by Dale Darlage
A hard-boiled detective novel, it is set in a future in which mankind has moved
to new worlds far away from Earth and created any number of new technologies. But people still find themselves
confronted by age-old problems that come from within humanity itself. In the end, despite all of the glitz of
spaceships and high tech weaponry, this is really a book about freedom vs. tyranny, redemption, revenge, justice, and honor.
Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rich Horton
The story is set on Earth (perhaps), far in the future, as the climate is failing. The dominant "city" is called
Spearpoint -- a vertical city, spiralling around a structure that seems to extend all the way to space. As the
levels in Spearpoint increase in altitude, there is also an increase in what technology works. From the top
comes Quillon, a posthuman renegade who discovers that his former masters are sending newly modified angels to kill him.
Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
The novel starts in a city perched part
way up a massive spire known as Spearpoint. And at the very edge of the city an apparently dead angel is
found. Angels come from higher up Spearpoint where a more advanced technology is possible, but every so often one
ends up in the city and, when they do, they are taken to Quillon. Quillon is a pathologist who has been making a
study of angels; but this one isn't quite dead, rather he has undertaken a suicide mission in order to get a
message to Quillon. The message is: flee.
Thousandth Night and Minla's Flowers by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Derek Johnson
Both stories showcase some of Alastair Reynolds's best features: the ease with which he creates
interesting characters in strange settings; his ability
to blend space opera with other generic forms (mystery in "Thousandth Night," bildungsroman in "Minla's Flowers");
his knowledge of current physics and technologies that, while consistent with what might be possible, never read
as flat or arid.
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
an audiobook review by Sarah Trowbridge
Set in the 25th and 26th centuries, it follows the adventures of three
disparate, more-or-less human characters in different circumstances and different parts of the galaxy as their goals and
objectives gradually converge. Dan Sylveste, an archaeologist with a few techno-physiological modifications
who stays in fairly regular contact with his dead father; Ilia Volyova, one of a triumvirate of cybernetically
enhanced humans piloting a light-hugger interstellar vessel; and Ana Khouri, an ex-soldier
whom we first encounter working as an assassin for a firm that serves the recreational needs of the very rich.
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rich Horton
This is a novel that serves up most anything a Space Opera addict could
ask for: vast time scales (the book is set several million years in the future), vast distances (the characters
traverse thousands of light years, and in fact the state of the Andromeda Galaxy is an important plot point),
powerful and exotic tech, from space drives (light speed limited, mind you) to robots to weapons to things like
stardams (to keep a supernova from harming nearby systems), and of course space battles and exploding ships.
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
Space opera is all about scale, the biggest devices, the biggest bangs, the biggest distances. And no-one does
size quite like Alastair Reynolds. Here, his (human) heroes are millions of years old and regularly circumnavigate the
galaxy, they have the technology to safely enclose a sun that is about to go nova, and they are about to get involved in a
conflict whose origins lie eons before and whose resolution will extend to another galaxy.
Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
The stories collected here, some of them
written and published before Revelation Space, show us even more about the future the author has envisioned, and
often give us details of characters lives and events that are alluded to in the novels. At the same time, they prove
that his writing can be just as dark and intense at shorter lengths as it is in novels like Chasm City and Absolution Gap.
The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Here, the author takes us back to the universe he has explored in most of his writing
career, starting in Revelation Space and continuing through to Absolution Gap, plus
a collection, Galactic North. The Prefect takes place earlier than any of the other novels,
and is set in the Glitter Band, a collection of over one hundred thousand habitats orbiting in the same system as the planet
Yellowstone. It's a near Golden Age for the Glitter Band, but something is amiss and all life may be in jeopardy.
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Zima Blue and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Hard science fiction, and space opera, are styles of SF that tend to work better at lengths longer than short stories. The depth
of historical background, and the ideas needed to sustain a story that ranges far in space and time often requires a fairly large
number of words. In order to make it work at a shorter length, hard SF writers tend to focus in on a single idea. The story
becomes an exploration of that idea, sometimes at the expense of character and style.
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rich Horton
It opens with a curious prologue set 18,000 years in the future, describing an ambitious plan to celebrate the legendary
Benefactor who started humanity on the road toward expansion into the Galaxy. Then we get a flashback to 2057, and the story of
this Benefactor, a woman named Bella Lind. Bella is the captain of an ice mining spaceship, the Rockhopper. This ship is
suddenly diverted to chase a moon of Saturn, Janus, which has suddenly accelerated and headed out of the Solar System: clearly,
it's an alien artifact of some sort. Bella, however, must convince her crew to go
along: it's a highly dangerous mission, and their corporate bosses do not inspire confidence.
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by David Soyka
A crew of commercial "space divers" recovers water-rich ice comets that are "pushed back" to the inner worlds
for mining. On one of their trips, Janus, a moon of Saturn, is moving out of orbit and behaving like an alien spacecraft.
Their company mining ship Rockhopper is the only vessel close enough to intercept for an intelligence mission.
Trouble is, the company owner isn't telling all it knows about Rockhopper's ability to return home.
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rich Horton
The story begins on two threads. One concerns Wendell Floyd, an American in Paris in 1959. But his Paris is rather
altered: its technology lags our own 1959 just a bit, apparently because World War II never happened.
Floyd is a sometime jazz musician who mainly works as a private detective, and he is drawn into investigating
the mysterious death of an American woman. Meanwhile, three centuries in the future, Verity Auger, an expert on Paris in
the 21st Century, is maneuvered into accepting a strange assignment: wormhole travel back to Paris in 1959. It
seems an agent has just been murdered, and Verity must try to recover some valuable information she had gathered.
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Martin Lewis
When the novel begins, we are in Paris. What's more it is the 50s. Wendell
Floyd is an ex-pat American who came to France to become a jazz musician. Instead he became a private detective, although
he and his partner, Andre Custin, still play in order to make ends meet. A pragmatist and political animal rather than tough
guy gumshoe Floyd finds the answer to his money woes in an apparent suicide. When a young American woman, Susan White, is found
dead outside her apartment her landlord does not accept the view of the police that she jumped and hires the pair to investigate.
Suddenly, the next chapter takes us somewhere else entirely. Or perhaps not. We are still in Paris but in a very different Paris;
an ice-locked city haunted by the furies of a 23rd Century Nanocaust. Paris, and the whole of the Earth, is abandoned and dead.
Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Spreading human civilization has triggered attacks from a machine intelligence known as the Inhibitors. This novel
splits its story between two locales, the planet Ararat, where Scorpio and Clavain find their refuge under attack, and Hela, where a
strange astronomical phenomena has attracted the attention of religious zealots, who see a planet's vanishing and reappearance as a
sign of the end times.
Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by David Soyka
Set in the same far-future setting of his grand space opera novels, this
novella portrays sibling rivalry and reconciliation in the context of planetary invasion and destruction.
Sisters Naqi and Mini Okpik are researchers on the largely aquatic world of Turquoise, studying a life form that coats the oceans
in an algae-like way. (A song lyric by Echo and the Bunnymen apparently inspired the setting.) The life form is a Pattern Juggler,
which inhabits other worlds (and figures a bit in the author's other novels).
Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by David Soyka
When last we saw our intrepid heroes, the search for the cause of the extinction of the ancient race of the Amarantin had somehow or
another transformed archeologist Dan Sylveste and his wife Pascale into some
sort of stellar consciousness. Meanwhile, his two unwilling accomplices are dealing with their own plights -- the hired assassin
Khouri seeks to return to "normal" existence while purported war criminal and weapons expert Ilia Volyova is warming up her ship's
preserved Captain, whose consciousness is merging with onboard AI systems...
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by David Soyka
The typical space opera conventions are here -- interstellar travel among human colonized worlds, a menace
to the universe, a hero on a quest, sardonic dialogue, one dimensional characters -- but they're dressed
up with hard SF speculations about the nature of the universe without violating known astrophysical laws, combined with the
tropes of seemingly sentient artificial constructs and biomechanical prosthetic enhancements
that blur the distinction between human and machine. All of which serves to take the much, and perhaps
deservedly, denigrated term of "space opera" to another level.
Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rodger Turner
The Childe family has spent 250 years in deep space exploration looking for
signs of alien life or remnants of their civilization. In a far off corner,
on a planet called Golgotha, a ship making repairs has found a building
shaped like a cathedral spire with a bulb seemingly spiked on the top. Its
purpose and its contents remain a mystery, for the spire's defenses repel
with deadly force all those who enter -- unless they can solve the puzzles
which control access to its rooms. Childe has brought together a group to
crack the mystery of an alien artifact on this faraway planet.
Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rich Horton
Set in the same future as his first novel, Revelation Space, the book follows
Tanner Mirabel who comes to Yellowstone from Sky's Edge (a planet of 61 Cygni A in the Delta Pavonis star system).
He is looking to kill Argent Reivich, who had killed the woman he loved. While tracking him down,
we learn about Reivich's attempt on an arms dealer's life (in revenge for supplying the weapons that killed Reivich's family) and
Tanner's infection with an "indoctrination virus," which implants memories of Sky Haussmann, the sometimes revered,
sometimes hated, last Captain of the first ship to reach Sky's Edge.
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
The novel centres on Dan Sylveste, an archeologist studying the
remains of an extinct, bird-like alien race. His past is tied to the crew
of the Infinity, who need information stored in Sylveste's head. Events
lead to a large, heavily defended artifact orbiting around a neutron star,
which seems to hold all the answers. Along the way there are kidnappings,
political revolutions, betrayals, and intrigue.
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