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Title: Revelation Space |
Review of Revelation Space
- Alastair Reynolds's critically acclaimed debut has redefined the space opera with a staggering journey across vast gulfs of time and space to confront the very nature of reality itself.
Product Description
- Alastair Reynolds's first novel is "hard" SF on an epic scale, crammed with technological marvels and immensities. Its events take place over a relatively short period, but have roots a billion years old--when the Dawn War ravaged our galaxy.
Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.
Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas--Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity--and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.
The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons.
At the heart of this artifact, the final revelations detonate--most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com Review
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Comments for Revelation Space
- Posted on 2008-10-17
Fantastic epic of the highest order
The entire Revelation Space series is a space opera of the highest order. Alastair Reynolds has set the new bar by which science fiction of the new millenium should be judged. Unlike many science fiction novels, the characters of the Revelation Space saga are highly developed and full of deep motivations. Everything about this series will stay with you long after you close the final page.
Score: 5
- Posted on 2008-10-08
A sprawling mess of a book
The first 330 pages of this 581-page tome were a chore to push through. The pacing was poor, and the storyline advanced glacially. Finally, as I was on the verge of giving up, the story hooked me enough to push through to the end, but the final 100 pages were disappointing, too. As an earlier reviewer remarked, what this book needed more than anything else was an editor. Reynolds' publisher seems to have been surprisingly indulgent with a first-time author. There are ideas enough for a decent 300-page novel here, but: there's too much extraneous action and unnecessary dialog; the characters are poorly drawn; explanations are witheld for the sake of drama, but at the expense of coherence; and Reynolds aspires to literary heights of prose that, frankly, are beyond his skill, giving the whole book a pretentious air. After reading REVELATION SPACE, I can't say I'm in a hurry to read any of Reynolds' subsequent works. Skillful editing would have made for a much tighter, better story.
Score: 2
- Posted on 2008-09-21
A Science Fiction master piece!
From the first get-go, Alastair Reynolds propels the reader into an intriguing narrative that somersaults through relativistic space and time. A first acquaintance with Daniel Sylveste takes place on a remote planet called Resurgam, at the site of a dig. The scene illumines Sylveste's feverish mission to shed light on how, and why, something wiped the ancient avian species of the Amarantin from the collective memory of the universe. After a mere chapter, the plot complicates into something that denies interpretation unless the reader devotes their thinking to the relative space and time continuum governing the story as a whole.
Several parallel threads drive the timeline forwards into a tangential point where all time and action unites into a joint series of events. Through these threads, Reynolds describes the procedures leading up to a pivotal event on a galactic scale.
Daniel Sylveste, sole heir of the once mighty Sylveste clan, explores the nine hundred thousand years old past of the Amarantin species through explicitly advanced methods, reading the old graphic language of a culture long since forgotten. What he reveals does not only implicate himself, but his species as a whole. A danger lurks somewhere in the vastness of space, a danger that can destroy worlds, and Dan commits himself to explore the intricate details around this lurking horror, for better or for worse.
Alastair Reynolds explores the fringes of science fiction in a skillful manner that rarely shows itself in what we know as mainstream authorship. Revelation Space poses a subtle mix of scientific deductions that blend seamlessly with a tale of utter epic proportions into what Locus called the "the space opera of 2000."
After reading novels like The Eternal Champion and Consider Phlebas, I assumed that I had touched the edges of science fiction, but I could not have been more wrong in that assumption. Reynolds pushes the envelope one notch further, breaking it down neutrino by neutrino, and restructuring it with surgical precision into a mighty yarn of relativistic dreams. Revelation Space bound me, inevitably, by the sheer ideas purported through the story lines that unfolded before my inner vision. The book hooked me from the very first page, and I found it very hard to take a brief pause to contemplate the massive underlying theories that poses as the core of the novel.
Score: 5 - Posted on 2008-08-26
It's ok
It is an O.K. story told from the prospective of 3 different characters:
1. Ana Khouri (a paid assasain)
2. Triumvir Ilia Volyova is a crewmember Triumvir Ilia Volyova of the space ship "Nostalgia for Infinity".
3. Dan Sylveste (an archeologist studying a dead alien culture)
This book reminds me of a short story by David Brin in " River of Time" where Humans are "Late in the GAme" in the Universe and a war between machines took place eons ago.
It is an interesting story, but I found it hard to keep track of the different terms like "Trumivir" or "Ultra". Also the female characters are not really believable and often the dialogue between the characters didn't seem to be real ("Nobody would talk like that in real life!").
I believe this is a beginning of a series. I don't know if I want to invest the time to read the other books in this series.
I would say that if you can't find anything else to read, you could do worse than this book, and it is very entertaining.
This book reminds me of a short story by David Brin in " River of Time".
Score: 3
- Posted on 2008-08-23
Disappointing Revelation
As many reviews here have noted, the pacing and flow of the novel are ragged. The plot alternately stalls and lurches forward, often aided quite literally by deus ex machina elements. The use of many short scenes is a conjurer's trick aimed at convincing the reader that more is happening than really is. And introducing the bulk of the mystery early on and then waiting for all the characters to slowly uncover that same data over hundreds of pages fails to build suspense. Reynolds has repeated sections where characters restate information we already know, as if to remind us that "don't forget, there's something important just around the bend." Or perhaps he was afraid the reader would be lost in the juggling plotline. The novel is longer than it needs to be and the ending falls very flat after slogging through nearly 600 pages of promises that something big is going to be revealed.
The characters are one of the major failings of the novel. If the novel was meant to be about the journey, the character interactions needed to be much more varied and interesting than repeated hostile showdowns. After spending so much time with these characters, we should also know much more about why they are so driven and obsessive. "Aliens warped their minds," "he's just a jerk," and "he/she/it is crazy" begin to wear a bit thin. I had no idea where the rare emotions that anyone displays for anyone else came from. A few ambiguous, amoral characters who struggle to communicate or empathize with others might have worked--populating the novel with them is severe overkill. Who are we supposed to root for? The abstract idea of humanity as a species? I did not care if a single one of these characters survived. And the revelation they uncover was not worth forcing myself to pretend to care as they plowed forward.
By far the most interesting aspects of the novel, and the only reason I wavered between two and three stars, are the intriguing setting and the technologies that Reynolds imagines. An epic novel based on presenting these aspects in greater detail or greater scope would have been more satisfying. But we view these elements only through the claustrophobic perspective of a small collection of unlikeable or simply inscrutable characters.
Score: 2
