Lonely Planets

Another positive feature of a series (as opposed to a stand-alone novel) is that it sometimes gives the author the chance to take you deeper into their imaginary universe and give you a guided tour of a key location. Two good examples are Chasm City (Alastair Reynolds) and Look To Windward (Iain M. Banks).

Reynolds' novel continues in the same vein as Revelation Space - trust nothing you read. Chasm City is a multilayered society with extremes of poverty and avarice, and a criminal Layer Cake that leaves no sector untouched, and the mysteries and betrayals are equally multilayered. The architecture of the city itself relates to its past as you will discover, with structures at a certain altitude distorted by a nanoplague.

Ma'saaq Orbital, the setting for Look To Windward, is a Culture ringworld, and the population have expanded around the ring to find the space to explore their imaginative and eccentric Culture lifestyles. The plot takes the reader around the ring. Ma'saaq is governed by one of Banks' superintelligent ship AIs, and this AI, it's history and the significance of it's ruling task are explored in depth.

Both locations and their populations are fleshed out into complex and plausible human societies - this is travel fiction at its best. Curiously both locations feature an eccentric cable-car network - Reynolds' cars traverse the height of an overgrown city sector by leaping from vine to vine; Banks are clockwork and deliberately maintained in a state of disrepair for artistic reasons.

Ground Control to Prefect Tom

The Prefect is a novel set in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. This one is set within the community of orbiting habitats around the planet Yellowstone, known as (ahem) the Glitter Band. This places it before the events of the other Revelation Space novels.

The Glitter Band is made up of about 10,000 habitats each with tens or hundreds of thousands of inhabitants; they are more or less autonomous and each has its' own eccentric society ranging from art collectives to "voluntary tyrannies." The set-up resembles Ancient Greek city-state democracy, with a federal police force, the Panoply, that polices every citizen's access to e-democracy.

The opening chapter introduces Prefects Tom Dreyfus and Thalia Ng as they investigate an electoral anomaly in one of the habitats. Having read Century Rain, a Reynolds novel separate from Revelation Space and an experimental detective story, I wondered if this would be a sci-fi police procedural as this is the initial tone. However, the plot soon widens to take in larger sci-fi concepts and conspiracies. Reynolds' characters are often called upon to make moral choices, and this is taken to extremes in The Prefect as Panoply agents are forced, over and over again, to decide whether to "euthanise" individuals or entire habitats to protect the entire Band; in parallel, similar choices have to be made regarding the treatment of senior prefect Aumonier who is infected by a parasite of unknown origin.

There's a traitorous-senior-officer subplot which is well executed if a bit predictable (I'd love to read a political novel in any genre where a senior officer wasn't plotting to overthrow the commander). On second thoughts, having lived through the Blair-Brown years here in the UK, perhaps this is simply a reflection of real life. And of course let's not forget Klingon culture where it is the duty of the second-in-command to plot to overthrow the captain.

This novel stands up well against the rest of Reynolds' work, full of memorable characters, plot twists and revelations, and thought provoking moral dilemmas on all scales. The Revelation Space universe has now reached escape velocity and left Earth's region of influence - as a result you should definitely read the earlier books before this one (starting with Revelation Space itself), as factions such as the Conjoiners, Ultras and artificial intelligences are more or less taken for granted here.

Spiders from Mars - the novel

Those of you old enough to remember Isaac Asimov might also have fond memories of reading through a novel or short story to discover the twist at the end of the tale. This device was popular in its time but is far too tame for the Tiffany-twisted mind of Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space, who instead packs at least two twists into each paragraph. No-one is who, or what they seem, and everyone has a hidden agenda. The plot centres on conflicts between different groups of humans with different attitudes to modifying their bodies or minds; alien species and artefacts are present and central to the plot but in a more mysterious way.

It's not perfect. Few of the characters are likeable (or dislikeable) - mostly they're just bad guys trying to out-bad each other. It's worth sticking with Reynolds though as characterisation improves significantly through the later novels, and there are a few more plot twists ahead too... Easter-egg fans will enjoy looking out for Bowie references and other musical influences.