ere is a successor to a book--Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds's first novel--which needed a sequel. It still does. Chasm City is not it. Nor does it intend
to be.
Reynolds's vast new tale may be set on the same planet and in the same complicated space-opera universe as its predecessor, and may incorporate occasional nods to the protagonists of that first book, whose stories have become urban legends a few centuries down the line, when this volume opens; but the cosmogonic puzzles left at the end of Revelation Space remain unhatched. Chasm City has other fish to fry.
Puddle fish? Small fry? Maybe, maybe not.
For most of its very considerable length, Chasm City unfolds at an exceedingly amiable pace, a sort of relaxa-opera makes-all-stops lope through sagebrush and backstory until we reach the mean-street slums and crannies of the world-city which gives the book its title and the capitol of Yellowstone, a planet gone old, where the main action is scheduled to take place. And here the story--a recounting of the first stages of Tanner Mirabel's hunt across the stars to revenge himself against a man named Reivich who had gunned down his employer--halts completely for a bit of sightseeing. There is nothing surprising in this (space operas in general tend to the set piece; space operas over 500 pages long tend absolutely to the set piece), for Chasm City, as Reynolds conceives it, is too tempting
not to describe at length, a future gone ancient, a fine old mess to dabble the pen in.
(There is not, of course, anything inherently dodgy in the thought that the future might in fact be older than the now. One of the more beguiling illusions of 20th-century SF, after all, was the underlying hope or plea that the next new thing the world was due to experience might be a young new thing. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; sometimes the next is just next. We have now begun a new century on this planet, and the space operas now being written tend to convey a sense of the antiquity of what's to come, and to build their tales back up from the ruinous weight
of the future.)
Reynolds wraps up his best work
Before the book begins--though long after the time of Revelation Space--Chasm City was a vast shining metropolis, an intricate sporulation of the dream of urbanity balanced around the rim of the great rift in the planet from which breathable air and other unguents rise, as though by magic. But a plague--which afflicts all machines, including the nanoware that runs the world--has turned Chasm City into an Escherian topology of slum, slurry, geometries that stress the eye with wrongness (one of the
districts of the transfigured city is named after M.C. Escher). Anything shaped or run by nanoware--from humans with implants to the buildings and arcologies they inhabit--has taken on a quasi-organic torture-garden face, what one might call Golem Grotesque, the quasi-animate face things take when they are stretched beyond their means. Chasm City is an explosion of bankrupt gesture, hubris without aspiration, parody without point, through which, as the plot advances, flashes of the past illuminate the reader's mind with the gravitas of some long multistoried inchworm glacier under the midden. Chasm City is a surface of slurry piled helter-skelter on top of myth, a garden where stories grow.
It is the best thing Reynolds has done.
But first we have to get there. This is a problem. Reynolds's protagonist--we guess very soon after meeting him--is going to be one of those space-opera protagonists with a lot of identity problems. Tanner Mirabel is haunted by memories of his seemingly dead employer and the traumatic firefight that cost so many lives; he is also haunted by a set of inserted memories out of the life of Sky Haussmann, the anti-hero who had founded Tanner's home planet, where the action of Chasm City begins so leisurely. These memories not only arrive in chronological order but impose themselves on Tanner's sensorium just when he is going to find the lessons they impart really useful.
This is lucky. Tanner--who tells the whole of Chasm City in a tough-guy first-person lingo taken from the kind of noir private-eye novel usually set in mid-20th century California--is a man desperately in need of help. Following his linguistic model, Tanner is rude, resentful, bullying, haunted and very, very thick. He is run from pillar to post by every other character in the book. He guesses nothing as fast as his slowest readers will have. He insults and betrays everyone who wants to help him. Like his California models, he struts down the mean steampunk streets of Chasm City--"A man with a wound, come to our mean streets to right some wrongs?" suggests one of the women who can't resist him--on a knight-errant quest whose idiocy is nearly preternatural. (Reivich had killed Tanner's employer for honourable reasons; by taking a slower-than-light ship to another star in order to find a man who does not deserve to be stalked, Tanner has left his own era, and any meaning inherent in his quest, far behind.) But just as we are about ready to chuck our dim hero, and Chasm City itself (no matter how intriguingly it has been depicted), we begin to wake up to what Reynolds is on about.
Tanner Mirabel is thick because he has been designed to be thick. Rather like Chasm City itself, he is a thin swab of slurry overlying some very deep story indeed. He is a puppet of the past. Readers familiar with Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons (1990) may have guessed early on that the dovetailing structure of Chasm City was designed to do one main thing: to unravel Tanner like an onion. Readers unfamiliar with Banks may have guessed anyway, as Reynolds lays down hints in plenty.
So it is all right to amble through Chasm City with galoshes-brain. It is all right to gape at the sights, delectate the virtuoso set pieces, enjoy the food, the sex, the rain, the Raymond Chandler. It is all right because, in the end, we fall like plumb lines into the chasm at the heart of the book, and find out things about Tanner's multiple innards, and find out things about the universe. Chasm City is a thick book which was designed to be thick. It is a book which is full of onions.
In the end, it's a joy.
