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Hundreds of thousands of years ago, an ancient race of sentient aliens known as the Amarantin went extinct just as their civilization experienced a golden age. No one knows why, but archeologist Dan Sylveste is determined to find out. Unlike the other colonists on the remote planet of Resurgam, he believes that the answer may be important.
He has no idea how right he is.
Just as he’s on the verge of a major breakthrough, a team of rebels takes over the administration of the colony. Sylveste becomes a prisoner of war, and his research comes to a frustrating halt.
Meanwhile, on Yellowstone (the nearest human-inhabited planet to Resurgam), a mysterious entity known as The Mademoiselle hires assassin Ana Khouri for a special mission: kill Dan Sylveste.
The only ship headed in that direction, however, is an ancient warship commanded by a rouge crew of Ultras, genetically modified transhumans. They seek Sylveste in order to heal their captain, who suffers from a plague that melds human biology with advanced technology. The de facto leader, Illia Volyova, hires Khouri to replace the ship’s gunner, who went mad and mysteriously died.
But neither Khouri nor Volyova realize that the thing that drove the gunner mad still resides deep in the ship’s systems. It is neither human nor AI–and it knows what killed off the Amarantin nine hundred thousand years ago.
Revelation Space is a space opera unlike any other that I’ve read, with the possible exception of Dune. The far-future universe Alastair Reynolds created for this book is incredibly complex and expansive, almost completely unrecognizable from our own, with technology bordering on godlike, posthuman and transhuman races that are all but commonplace, and nothing but a blurry, indistinct line dividing the human and the machine. On every page, I felt as if I had left the real world behind for something completely (and often disturbingly) alien.
Setting, by far, is the strongest point of this book. In fact, as an aspiring writer, I found it somewhat intimidating. Reynold’s Revelation Space universe was completely alien, but in ways that made perfect sense for the far future in which it was set. From this, I’ve learned that to make a far future setting believable, you have to make it…well, as alien and complex as Reynolds makes it. It shouldn’t be an exact copy of Reynold’s mold, of course, but if it’s 500 years in the future and everyday life still feels exactly like our own–well, there had better be a reason for that.
As for character and plot, I did not feel that those were particular strong points of this book. It’s not that they were done poorly, it’s just that they weren’t done well enough, in my opinion.
The characters in Revelation Space did not particular engage me at first; I found that I had to force myself to keep reading, rather than read because I had to find out what happened to them. Later on, as the story progressed, they grew on me, but I never felt that I intimately knew them.
As for plot, I felt that every fifty or one hundred pages, Reynolds would pause the story and throw something in from left field, simply because he had to foreshadow something coming up. In this way, the book seemed a little choppy–like a debut novel (and, in Reynold’s defense, this is his debut novel).
Even with these issues, however, this was an incredible book, and it’s stuck with me even months after finishing it. Reynolds pulled off an amazing ending–very satisfying, with a twist that I had not foreseen but that made good sense. The final scene, and the last two sentences of the final scene in particular, were just awesome. They made me want to clap my hands and say “bravo.”
If I could describe Revelation Space in terms of other works, I would say that it’s a cross between Neuromancer and Stargate the movie. While it’s solid space opera, it has a dark and gritty feel that borders on Cyberpunk / post-Cyberpunk. It’s not exactly the kind of stuff I want to write, it comes pretty darn close.
