Alastair Reynolds delivers new REVELATION SPACE novel

Alastair Reynolds has delivered a new novel in his Revelation Space universe, and the first to be set after the events of the original trilogy.

Reynolds rose to fame with the initial Revelation Space trilogy - Revelation Space (2000), Redemption Ark (2002) and Absolution Gap (2003) - and a standalone spin-off, Chasm City (2001). He later added two prequels, The Prefect (2007, reissued a decade later as Aurora Rising) and Elysium Fire (2018); a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003); and a short story collection, Galactic North (2006).

The new book is called Inhibitor Phase and is set shortly after the events of Absolution Gap, which saw the defeat (more or less) of the machine intelligence known as the Inhibitors, who were trying to prevent the rise of sentient organic life in the galaxy. The new book is not intended as a continuation of the main series, but will be a standalone book.

All being well, Inhibitor Phase should hopefully be released in late 2021 or early 2022.

Where to Start: The Revelation Space Chronology (updated)

It's been nearly ten years since my first crack at a chronology for the Revelation Space series of novels and short stories by Alastair Reynolds. Since then some new books have come out and comments on the original article have revealed a couple of discrepancies which - hopefully! - have now been fixed.

Chronological Order

AD 2205: "Great Wall of Mars" *
2217: "Glacial" *
2230: "A Spy in Europa *
2358: "Weather" *
2427: The Prefect (aka Aurora Rising)
2428: Elysium Fire
c. 2500: "Diamond Dogs" **
c. 2511: "Monkey Suit" ***
c. 2513-40: "Dilation Sleep" *
c. 2520: Chasm City
c. 2540: "Grafenwalder's Bestiary" *
2541: "Turquoise Days" **
2524-2567: Revelation Space
c. 2600: "Nightingale" *
2605-2651: Redemption Ark
c. 2675-3000: Absolution Gap
2303-40,000: "Galactic North" *


* Story in Galactic North
** Novella in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
*** Story in Deep Navigation

Source.

Best Reading Order

Chasm City
Revelation Space
Redemption Ark
Absolution Gap
Galactic North
The Prefect (aka Aurora Rising)
Elysium Fire

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Map of the REVELATION SPACE universe

Alastair Reynolds has posted this map of the star systems that appear in the Revelation Space novels and short stories.

The map was created by Richard Terrett, a fan of Reynolds's work.

The Revelation Space books by chronology

With the news circulating about Alastair Reynolds' major new publishing deal, I've noticed that there's been a fair bit of interest circulating on forums by people who haven't tried reading him before and want to know where to start.

For the stand-alones, it's pretty straightforward. The novels Century Rain, Pushing Ice, House of Suns and the forthcoming Terminal World are all set in their own universes with no link to each other or to his main series. The short story collection Zima Blue also consists of stand-alone stories or stories that are linked to one another, but nothing outside the collection. Out of all of these I would strongly recommend Pushing Ice as a solid starting point for its 'Big Dumb Object' SF style and its use of relativistic science, with some excellent characters and a solid story also present. Century Rain, whilst slightly weaker, does showcase Reynolds' interest in out-of-the-box thinking and his interest in noir thrillers.


The reading order for Reynolds' Revelation Space universe stories is altogether more complex, with the novels overlapping with the short stories (collected in Galactic North) and the two novellas (collected in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days).

This is the chronological order for the short stories, novels and novellas:

'Great Wall of Mars' *
'Glacial' *
'A Spy in Europa' *
'Weather' *
The Prefect
'Dilation Sleep' *
'Diamond Dogs' **
'Turquoise Days' **
'Grafenwalder's Bestiary' *
'Nightingale' *
Chasm City
Revelation Space
Redemption Ark
Absolution Gap
'Galactic North' *

* Story in Galactic North
** Novella in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Whether this is the best reading order for the books or not is debatable. I think it mostly works, although The Prefect may have more impact if read after the trilogy (Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap) when the reader is more familiar with the Conjoiner and Ultra factions. Also 'Weather' contains the answer to a major mystery from the trilogy about the Conjoiner lighthugger drives and may benefit from being read later on.

What I would say is that 'Great Wall of Mars' and 'Glacial' should definitely be read before the trilogy, as they introduce characters who otherwise show up out of nowhere in Redemption Ark, and 'Galactic North' (the story) should be read after everything else as it explains the (somewhat puzzling) ending to Absolution Gap and puts something of a full stop on the whole series and story. Chasm City can be read before or after the trilogy, but benefits much more from being read before as some of its characters play a role in Revelation Space.

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds' previous novels and novellas in his signature Revelation Space universe have been almost unanimously excellent works, but at times the reader (or this one, at any rate) can feel that there's a lot going on that they're not in the loop on. Characters appear whose significance is initially unclear and their backstories remain resolutely unexplained, although frequently alluded to, whilst the ending to Absolution Gap was rather abrupt, to say the least. Galactic North, a collection of eight short stories set in the universe, finally fills in the blanks and finally allows the reader to fully appreciate the breadth of this author's imagination.

Things kick off with Great Wall of Mars. Two centuries from now, the cybernetically-altered Conjoiners have sealed themselves off inside a fortified region of Mars. The forces of humanity opposed to the Conjoiners, the Coalition, is planning a final all-out assault but have agreed to a last-ditch peace mission undertaken by Nevil Clavain and a Demarchist mediator, Sandra Voi. Needless to say, things go awry. Those familiar with the previous novels will have a big grin on their face as we meet characters such as Clavain, Galiana and Felka for the first time, and find out how they met and how they get out of the jam they find themselves in here.

Glacial picks up the story some decades later, as the Conjoiner refugees find themselves wandering from star to star at sub-lightspeeds searching for a new home. On an ice world they find a human habitation, one of the few successfully established by the USA's seedship programme, and evidence of a crime that took place many years earlier which Clavain dedicates himself to solving. Reynolds' skills at detective fiction (previously employed in Century Rain and Chasm City) are on full display here and the story is very well-told.

A Spy in Europa is a neat story of sabotage, revenge and severe hubris. It sets up one of the later stories in the collection and provides some background on the Demarchists, another of the major factions of the Revelation Space universe. The ending is absolutely stellar.

Weather is an absolute barnstormer of a story. Reynolds take on the difficulties of space combat carried out between ships maneuvering at hundreds of thousands of miles per second has always been superb, but gets its best demonstration in this story. We also get one of the biggest mysteries in the Revelation Space universe revealed in this story in a startling manner, but it's the somewhat tender relationship between the narrator and his Conjoiner charge which gives the story its heart.

Dialation Sleep is the oldest story in the collection and the style isn't quite as polished as Reynolds' later work, but it's still an intriguing story about love and the loss caused by years spent in interstellar travel.

Grafenwalder's Bestiary is a thoroughly twisted story that serves as a semi-sequel to both the novella Diamond Dogs (published seperately by Gollancz with Turqoise Days) and to the earlier story A Spy in Europa. It's an excellent story about a collector in search of the perfect creatures to put on display, but there are echoes of other authors and stories here, in particular George RR Martin's Haviland Tuf stories and his famous novella Sandkings, but the ending is brilliant, if horribly inevitable.

I thoroughly recommend not eating anything before reading Nightingale, a thoroughly sick and twisted story of genetic manipulation. The ending is horrendous, but there is no denying the macabre brilliance of the tale.

Galactic North gives the collection its name and the entire Revelation Space universe its spine. We start off in 2303 AD with a frantic attempt to repair a stricken starship before the story carries us forwards through centuries and then millennia as the war against the Inhibitors, the Melding Plague, the Pattern Jugglers and every other major event of the previous novels and stories plays out as the backdrop to a story of absolute obsession and we finally discover the nature of the new threat that emerged at the end of Absolution Gap. A spectacular story that rounds off the collection in style.

Galactic North (****½) is a superb collection of stories from one of our very best SF writers, and is thoroughly recommended to newcomers to Reynolds' work and veterens of his previous tales alike. It is published by Gollancz in the UK and will by released on 27 May by Ace Books in the USA.

The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds

It is the year 2427. The place is the Glitter Band, ten thousand space habitats circling the planet Yellowstone, the golden heart of human space where a multitude of different cultures meet and trade, and a waystop for huge lighthuggers as they slowly traverse the distances between the stars at speeds just below that of light. This is the universe of Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds' critically-acclaimed gothic space opera which has now extended across five novels, two novellas and a short story collection. The Prefect is a stand-alone addition to this excellently-realised future history, taking place approximately a century before the events of Chasm City and Revelation Space itself.



Whilst the planet Yellowstone and its biggest settlement, Chasm City, deal with their own affairs, it falls to the prefects of Panoply to police the vast Glitter Band and its 100 million citizens, who practice the ultimate form of democracy, Demarchism. Every minute dozens of decisions, large and small, are put to the public vote and the people of the Glitter Band spend much of their time engrossed in politics, employing a form of VR known as Abstraction to talk to one another, or choosing to lose themselves in fantastical reflections of the real world. The greatest crime in the Glitter Band is an attempt to deny the will of the people. Voting fraud is a heinous perversion, one which the prefects exist to prevent at all costs.

An apparently routine case of voting fraud leads Tom Dreyfus and his team into a labyrinthe web of plots and conspiracies that threatens to destroy their very way of life. And, as this is a mystery novel, to say any more of the plot would threaten to indulge in spoilers. Suffice to say that the links between The Prefect and the other Revelation Space novels are subtle and numerous. The Prefect in fact occupies a position within its larger series framework similar to the position Steven Erikson's novel Midnight Tides occupies in his Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence: generally a standalone novel, but with equal arguments in favour of reading the book before the others (events in the other novels are clarified by information provided in The Prefect) or afterwards (when the reader understands exactly what will become of this society in the future).

Reynolds is on good form here, although arguably he fails to recapture the immediacy of his finest work, Chasm City. The Prefect is a somewhat more straightforward novel. Although there are several startling, late revelations and plot twists, the reader is in possession of most of the facts reasonably early in the book. Tom Dreyfus also remains a somewhat less complex protagonist then regular Reynolds readers may be used to, but as usual the author has a few aces up his sleeve which force the reader to reassess the character during the novel's conclusion.

In The Prefect Alastair Reynolds executes an enjoyable and extremely fast-paced return to the universe that made his name. The story develops nicely and explodes into a furious page-turning pace in its second half that barely lets up. At the same time Reynolds' ability to conjure up vivid imagery remains intact (one plotline is not for the squeamish or for anyone with a fear of knives), as does his assured grasp of his universe and the remarkable cultures and ideas that make it up. The book is not without its flaws - in particular, those who have already read Absolution Gap and know of Reynolds' fondness for ambiguous endings may be better-prepared for the conclusion than others - and there is perhaps a feeling that we are being set up for a sequel at the end, but these are fairly minor concerns. The Prefect is Reynolds' best novel since at least Redemption Ark, and is an engrossing read.

The Prefect (****) will be published by Gollancz in the United Kingdom in hardcover on 2 April 2007. The author has a website at this location.