The dig uncovers some unusual ruins associated with Resurgam’s now-extinct alien society, the Amarantin, but there’s trouble in the air, fomented it seems by Sylveste’s rival Girardeau. The book opens with an archaeological expedition on the frontier planet of Resurgam, led by Dan Sylveste, a scholar and adventurer haunted (in a technological sense) by the ghost of his father, Calvin, an early proponent, and casualty, of attempts to transfer human personalities into machine memory. Revelation Space itself is, in essence, a form of space opera, though it’s an example which scrupulously avoids the magical physics (of hyperdrive, inter-dimensional shortcuts, or whatever) that is typical of the subgenre. The books are characterised by Reynolds’ rigid adherence to what’s possible according to the laws of physics, and by detailed and intelligent extrapolations of the divergence of human society as humanity expands into the Galaxy.
Revelation Space is the first of his novels, several of which explore the same imagined universe portrayed here, though so far as I can establish each book is reasonably self-contained. Time, I suppose, will tell.Īlastair Reynolds is a British-born astrophysicist / writer, who has produced about a dozen SF novels and short story collections in the past eight years or so. Revelation Space is, for me, the midpoint, the half-way mark, the fourth Future Classic I’ve read and reviewed in recent months (which is not to imply that I personally intend to review all eight: I believe I’ve found other reviewers to tackle most of the remainder.) There’s no question that the four I’ve read have been good, very good, but projection of classic status is a tricky thing. The first layer is that, as science fiction, these novels present an image of society as it may unfold in the decades, centuries, or millennia hence the second layer is that these eight books, supposedly excellent examples of their craft, will in time come to be seen as classics of latter-day fin-de-siècle SF.
There’s a double layer of prediction implicit in the packaging of Gollancz’s reissuing of eight recent SF works as ‘Future Classics’. (Review first published on the ASIM website, February 2008)
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