The Prefect

Alastair Reynolds — 2022

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a policeman of sorts, and one of the best. His force is Panoply, and his beat is the multi-faceted utopian society of the Glitter Band, that vast swirl of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone. These days, his job is his life. A murderous attack against a Glitter Band habitat is nasty, but it looks to be an open-and-shut case - until Dreyfus starts looking under some stones that some very powerful people would really rather stayed unturned. What he uncovers is far more serious than mere gruesome murder: a covert takeover bid by a shadowy figure, Aurora (who may once have been human but certainly isn't now), who believes the people of the Glitter Band should no longer be in charge of their own destiny. Dreyfus discovers that to save something precious, you may have to destroy part of it.

Reviews

Gavin@gl

Mar 9, 2023

Great fun! Reynolds describes an Archipelago epistocracy - that is, a loose collection of thousands of city-states with their own weird constitutions (voluntary fascisms, upload city, voluntary coma land, luxury Running Man land), with federal votes weighted by your past performance at predicting / causing good changes. The only federal crimes are voting related: messing with the central vote, denying their citizens the vote. (They don't seem to enforce the other thing you'd need to make this minimally acceptable: iron exit rights.) Reynolds is clearly also having fun here, where I found Revelation Space exhaustingly grim and sepia. I particularly loved his entire society of professional superforecasters / high-quality futarchist voting bloc, who make their living off lobbyists and being bellwethers and spend most of their time buggering about with hobbies. (You are ejected if your calibration drops below 50% better than normal people.) He husbands his twists, and keeps almost all characters in the dark (including the antagonists) all the time. It also takes the horror of exponentials seriously; machine intelligence's scalability is the worst thing about it, and here we get two great scary instances. One downside is that it feels like book #3 in a series; maybe one infodump too few or something.

Cindy Lieberman@chicindy

Nov 9, 2022

A sprawling sci-fi mystery and detective story with interesting tech and world building. The Prefects are a combination of protectors and police for the Glitter Band’s worlds, both the democracies and those that willingly choose autocracies. Instead of recounting the complex and interwoven stories here, I recommend the review by @Apatt with one exception. I did not read other Relevation Space novels (yet) and was able to enjoy this as a stand-alone novel so long as I paid attention. He doesn’t spoon-feed the story and expects his readers to figure things out in context and as the story unfolds, which I quite enjoy. Reynolds is a great writer and his audiobooks have an excellent narrator.