Revelation Space – Alastair Reynolds
I don’t know if I can fully express my relationship with this book.
Revelation Space took me about a month to read. At 600 pages, this is nowhere near the longest book I’ve read, nor is it even the most confusing. It is, however, the most jam packed with foreign and novel ideas I’ve ever come across. The only other thing I can compare it to in terms of “out there” concepts bandied about is truly surreal work like, say, Naked Lunch. But Revelation Space is first and foremost a space-faring adventure novel. And it succeeds in that regard as well as being a vehicle for “hard SF storytelling.”
Revelation Space was published in 2000 and Reynolds has published either a novel of collection of short stories every year since (many in the same Universe.) It could be this book was a fluke, or it could be that he is my new favorite author of genre fiction. We shall soon see. Or not so soon – his 2001 novel is a full 100 pages longer.
Oh, the story of Revelation Space? I could try to summarize, but I’d just sound like a maniac. It has to do with Fermi’s Paradox, post-corporeal existence, faster-than-light travel, artificially reconstituted and downloaded personalities and “sick machines.” And cyborg pirates, kinda.