t is hard to resist a title like Revelation Space, until you
read the book. After reading a book like Alastair Reynold's huge first
novel with the bigthink title, it is equally hard to resist renaming it.
But No-News in Not-Space has some good bits too.
We will describe these good bits in good time.
First, though, it is necessary to talk about space opera. Some
writers and reviewers argue that the form, as it has evolved in recent
decades, is a triumph of late 20th century SF--it is an argument I have
presented here, or assumed, in reviews of Paul McAuley's Confluence
trilogy, Dan Simmons's Hyperion/Endymion epic, John Varley's The Golden
Globe, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky and Gene Wolfe's On Blue's Waters, which is the first part of the Book of the Short Sun. No-News in Not-Space--a tale containing no revelations locatable in any kind of space, and no place to climax in except a neutron star, a venue one might
describe as a place with no place for space--is a tale, in other words,
with a pedigree.
It is a pedigree, a tree of shared assumptions, that has been used
in the novels I just mentioned, and in several dozen other great examples
of the form. Modern space operas almost invariably incorporate some model
of our Home Galaxy (or maybe the entire Universe Show) that allows
large-scale stories to be told--FTL travel is usual, though not
inevitable; massive, plot-dense information transfer across time and
through space is almost mandatory; opposing philosophies are espoused by
whole civilizations; etc. And the story space operas tell within the
amplitude of this frame tends to be the story of how Things--that is,
Everything--got this way. Space operas, in other words, utilize a whole
array of absurdities in order to talk clearly and movingly about issues
too big for realism.
Right. Modern space operas are kind of analogous to ...
operas. The old joke-formulation is, perhaps, more than just a joke.
Both operas and space operas are absurd when described realistically; and
both make sense only when they lunge and lurch after the sublime. And
sometimes reach it. Operas and space operas are music: they are songs
about the sublime.
When they work.
Elaborate infodumps
The problem with Revelation Space is that Alastair Reynolds does
not seem to have spent any calories actually trying to make his bigthinks
about the sublime actually work. From the get-go, he hamstrings his story,
which takes place in several star systems, by eschewing FTL travel. Nor
does he permit anything like an "ansible," Ursula Le Guin's instantaneous
communication device, which she uses to tie her non-FTL Hain Universe
together (several other writers have borrowed the ansible for precisely
the same reason: it allows stories to be told).
Without FTL or ansible, Reynolds is forced to have recourse to a
whole repertory of storytelling devices--elaborate infodumps, backstory
detours, flashbacks, laborious dovetailings of narrative strands--in order
to get his cast together at the same time in the same place and in
possession of something like the same knowledge of what has happened or is
about to. Which means (unless the author is a lot more technically
sophisticated than Reynolds has yet become) that the text of a tale like
Revelation Space sinks under the weight of long sequences whose only
function is to color in the process of getting to the beginning of the
real story.
That real story, shorn of literally hundreds of pages of
crayoning, is certainly more complicated than what I'm about to suggest is
its gist, but not nearly as complicated as its telling.
A hollow planet
The Home Galaxy has too few civilizations in it. The reason for
this--a reasonably legitimate take-off from Fred Saberhagen's Berserker
series can be detected here--lies in the Dawn Wars a billion years ago, at
the devastating galaxy-wide climax of which one race (I think) turned
sour, and in order to prevent future catastrophes, transformed itself into
a galaxy-wide policing entity. Whenever intelligent species are found
developing, this "Inhibitor" race eliminates them.
Nine hundred thousand years ago, on the planet Resurgam, a sentient race begins
to evolve. Complicating the picture, a rump of this race takes flight from
the home planet, and therefore escapes the Inhibitors, who generate a solar
flare called the Event, which kills off all those still there.
The survivors (I may have this out of sync, but Revelation
Space is 200,000 words long, much of it containing speculations later
proven wrong) build a hollow planet around the neutron star which twins
their own home star. The neutron star is actually a universe-remembering
computer. Within the hollow planet is a great light and something orbiting
it. The light--which gives those who see it religious epiphanies--is the
honey trap for sentient species; the something which orbits it is a signal
box for the Inhibitors.
Who are now asleep, 900,000 years later. Enter homo sapiens. The
hero, Dan Sylveste, autarch of the human colony on Resurgam (until he's
deposed), is obsessed by signs that the Event is more complicated than it
seems. But (many years earlier, because there is not FTL) he has been
marked for assassination. A female assassin is hired; she allows herself
to be abducted by the crew of a "lighthugger" spaceship who also want to
get hold of Sylveste, for very complicated backstory reasons. Laboriously,
the lighthugger makes its way to Resurgam.
Sylveste is duly brought aboard. Various entities--AIs, ghosts,
partials, the sort of conglomeration now properly de rigueur in any space
opera which attempts to incorporate the implications of the information
revolution right here on Earth in the year 2000--all get into the act,
dysfunctionally, as nobody in the book really likes anybody else in the
book. Sylveste, who is infected by a still-existing member of the 900,000-year-old rump, has to be stopped before he activates the Inhibitors. Or
not.
A feeling that the song never got sung
In the end, the neutron star, and the transcendent light inside
the hollow artifact, and the thingamee orbiting it, all seem to have
something to say about everything. What they say (I attest) does not
constitute a revelation (and in any case, "revelation space" is a term
used in the novel to describe the inside of a red-herring galactic entity
called the Shroud, which is brought stage front to help kick the backstory
into action, and is afterwards forgotten).
And we end. There have been lots of good ideas, lots of bits of
fun, a sad moment or two, ambition galore, some eloquent passages,
dark-hued tapestries of infodump lining the aisles of Story; a feeling
that the song never got sung.
A sequel may reveal all.
But do not watch this space.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has
been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
