Revelation Space
| Author | Alastair Reynolds |
|---|---|
| Year | 2000 |
| Pages | 585 |
| Goodreads | View on Goodreads (opens in new tab) |
| Rating | ★★★☆☆ (3/5) |
A scientist, an engineer and an assassin enter a bar…
Revelation Space starts following three different characters at three different points in time in different places. Eventually the story opens up in a very interesting way and ends up in the big idea style of science fiction.
The story itself was fun and interesting. At no point was I bored. On the other hand, about two thirds in, I felt like the characters suddenly started behaving with little sense, and the story got a bit mangled. It got better, and some of the weirdness is later explained, but it’s a bit as though the whole novel was revised a few times — except from that point on, where the first draft was used. It did not affect my general enjoyment of the story, but the novel suffered for it (1)I did check whether the novel was the first by Reynolds. It was not, but it’s one of the first novels, so I hope these issues won’t affect further novels. .
The universe that Reynolds builds is great. It feels like realistic sci-fi, very futuristic without tipping into magic. Humanity can’t communicate easily across vast distances, so different cultures arise and different technology levels are seen. No single strand of technology is predominant, but there are different examples of technological lines (spaceships and colonies, animals as machines, nanobots, AIs…). This makes it feel like a deep world, so there’s little surprise that there are lots of different novels set in the universe, even if not all are related to each other.
Another issue with the story is that, as in many science fiction novels, it starts with lots of name-dropping — technologies, planets, human history, cultures… — that the reader has no idea about yet. Every major thing is eventually well explained, and this is not really something done worse than in other similar stories, but for someone new to the genre it can make it hard to read. It helped, as it does when well done, with building the sense that the world is a living thing. There’s a glossary on the author’s page, but I would only check for specific terms when you’ve forgotten them, as the glossary may include spoilers (2)And for things not yet explained, it’s all okay and will be eventually explained anyway. .
In summary, I liked it a lot, and would recommend it to fans of big idea science fiction. I’ll definitely read the next book in the series or other books set in the same universe.