Alastair Reynolds

As human colonists settle on the planet of Amarantin, a world whose native inhabitants mysteriously vanished nearly a million years before, one man, Dan Silvester, becomes convinced that their disappearance could hold the key to human survival on the planet, but he soon discovers that someone will do anything to hide the truth. A first novel. Reprint.

Revelation Space

Cody Degen

** spoiler alert **
           Maybe 2+? Entire story felt like it lacked humanity, just was really hard to care about these characters when it spans such a long period of time and it’s so detached from the rest of humanity. Like, why would anyone care about putting these long term plans into action if they’re not gonna resolve for hundreds of years? Just found myself caring more about like, what’s happening on earth all this time instead

Nine hundred thousand years ago, something wiped out the Amarantin. For the human colonists now settling the Amarantin homeworld Resurgam, it's of little more than academic interest, even after the discovery of a long-hidden, almost perfect Amarantin city and a colossal statue of a wingest Amarantin. For brilliant but ruthless scientist Dan Sylveste, it's more than merely intellectual curiosity - and he will stop at nothing to get at the truth. Even if the truth costs him everything. But the Amarantin were wiped out for a reason, and that danger is closer and greater than even Sylveste imagines... REVELATION SPACE: a huge, magnificent space opera that ranges across the known and unknown universe...towards the most terrifying of destinations.

Adeline

Hernando

I've been wanting to dig into the Revelation Space for a while so I finally did it with this first installment. 
This is truly a great book with extremely awesome ideas and I really liked it but somehow I had the feeling that some of the characters were painfully annoying (Volyova specially) and were almost ruining the satisfying atmosphere set in the story. 


Worldbuilding (25%):	***** 
Ideas (25%): 		 ***** 
Plot (20%):		 ***** 
Characters (15%): 	 ** 
Writting (15%) : 	 **** 

My Rating : 4,4

Gavin

Sorta sterile prose but still very readable goth space opera. Simmonsian - "Stoners" and "shrouders". Herbertian atavism and castes. Shadowplay is good. Ideas are good - but I compare everyone's ideas to Banks and Stross. POV switches way too frequently - sometimes on every other page. This produces glibness. The narrative takes a series of 10 year slips, or 22 year slips, between scenes, which produces agreeable disorientation. Absolutely incredible denouement, best in recent memory.


How does it do as Serious science fiction?

 Social development: Notable because of its lack of play with human nature: Reynolds' people - no matter how bionic or brainwashed by aliens - are just us in a weird setting. Also the same politics and same weapons. The aliens are properly alien, though. 

 Software development: None I can remember.

 Actual Science: Not its game.

Shona Tiger

Very complicated story, great characters, amazing world-building, much to think about and enjoy. Will take longer to read than you think!

Jeff

Ewan

This was a first. Usually if it's a book that I don't finish that decision is made early. I got to page 420 out of 520 and just realised I really really didn't care

Cindy Lieberman

I was looking forward to reading this book, the first in the Revelation Space series by Reynolds. Unfortunately it was not as engaging as the other books of his that I’ve read and enjoyed. I’ve since learned that it is his first novel, and that the second in this series is much better. 

Despite amazing world building, perhaps too many worlds were built into this one. The story sprawls from its dramatic and cinematic opening over dozens of planets, with people dying or not and being real or not. The problem is that none of the characters is particularly likeable. 

Better bets @ 5 Stars (from me): House of Suns, The Prefect, the excellent short story Permafrost. 4 stars for the Revenger Series (the third entry is 2020 and I’ve not read it yet, but am looking forward to doing so) and Century Rain. That’s all I’ve read of Reynolds so far but most assuredly will continue.

Stephen Gill 

An outstanding piece of dark Hard SF, the future may not be as wonderful as we think.

"[A] tour de force... Ravishingly inventive."-Publishers Weekly The highly-acclaimed first novel in the Revelation Space universe-a debut that has redefined the space opera with a staggering journey across vast gulfs of time and space to confront the very nature of reality itself... Nine hundred thousand years ago, something annihilated the Amarantin civilization just as it was on the verge of discovering space flight. Now one scientist, Dan Sylveste, will stop at nothing to solve the Amarantin riddle before ancient history repeats itself. With no other resources at his disposal, Sylveste forges a dangerous alliance with the cyborg crew of the starship Nostalgia for Infinity. But as he closes in on the secret, a killer closes in on him. Because the Amarantin were destroyed for a reason, and if that reason is uncovered, the universe and reality itself could be irrevocably altered...

This is a novel mostly about fascinating, sci-fi-gothic settings and ideas. Just like many debut novels, it seems absolutely chock full of ideas, which leads to it having a slow start, a bit too much exposition, description and some info-dumps, whereas the characters and their feelings aren't gone into enough for my taste. There's very little gripping emotion, a lot of intellectual speculation and calculation, and characters that I didn't immediately relate to. Their coldness towards each other during the first half made it really hard for me to connect to any of them. BUT the mysteries, ideas and intricate plot became more and more intriguing with each page, the characters did warm up a little and grew on me, and I enjoyed the novel more and more. 

So, if you don't need a lot of emotional energy in your next read, but would love to explore a very cool, dark, gothic, cybernetic universe with great world-building, settings, hard science, ideas and mysteries, then I can absolutely recommend it. I do like House of Suns by the same author better - I think it shows how much Reynolds has grown and matured as a writer, while still remaining full of fascinating ideas. But once you're over the hurdle of its slow start, this one is a very interesting book, as well, and I'm glad I've finally read it.

Eduardo Sorribas

Great worldbuilding, great story! I have to keep reading this series!

Jorge Cimentada

** spoiler alert **
           Despite the slow start with three divergent stories not having any link between them, Reynolds has developed some great ideas in this book. The book is based on giving the reader very small inklings of the plot, making the buildup unreasonably slow. I think I started understanding the underlying plot by about 50% of the book and understood perhaps 2/3 of the plot by 80-90% of the book. I tend to find that long space operas tend to go that slow, why is that? 

The things I liked the most about the book where the deep concepts such as mind uploading, transhumanism and the lack of ubiquitousness of life in the galaxy. Transhumanism was awesome. Humans managed to achieve a sophistication of nano-level structures that we literally enhanced our memory, age and even our complete neural pathways to achieve a higher consciousness. Some parts are clearly taken to the extreme such as the the pattern jugglers, but it is indeed an idea which I can see us on a path to. Mind uploading was a concept of itself which I wasn't really familiarized with but it sounds awesome. Need to do some further reading on this.

The description of the Fermi paradox was very sci-fiish but very entertaining. The paradox is answered as that of a great ancient civilization called the inhibitionits which took upon them to  inhibit  the development of life. Fermi asked: where are the Aliens? Well, in Revelation Space they're there but they're always put back by inhibitionits through a drastic alternation of space where they can influence asteroids and other phenomena to destroy evolving life (this is all to avoid a war, because civilizations don't get along). It's a rather 'cool' explanation but I can't really extrapolate it to reality as something potentially possible. As Sagan said, it might just be that we destroy ourselves once we're close to technological maturity. This exarcebates my disregard of hard-scifier's ignorance towards social and power structures in some of their books.

I know hard sci-fiers tend to ignore deep social structures in their books but I insist. For example, I was lacking much more depth in the power structure of the Ultra ship Nostalgia for Infinity. They're all about loyalty, with a full-fledged Triumvir but hardly any concepts that drive the plot in how they work (something which the reader needs to assume based on their interactions). I won't argue that Chasm City or Yellow stone should also have needed a thorough social description since they book is hardly focused on that, but c'mon. Resurgam experienced a coup d'etat and you can't exploit the political background together with the science carried out by Sylveste?

As a scientific book, I applaud Alistair conveying the difficulty of the scientific endeavor. The activity of research by Sylveste is shown in a raw, uncolored environment where he continually struggles throughout the book to follow his scientific ideas. That is precisely how science works, through slow, decade-long findings which can be completely wrong if new evidence arises.

Let's see what the next book holds. The inhibitionists have played their first card and now Khoury and Volyova will sure want to understand who and where they are.

Revelation Space

Reviews