lastair Reynolds' newest novel is the fourth book in a sequence that began with Revelation Space (2000) and continued with Chasm City (2001) and Redemption Ark (2002). Theoretically, this novel concludes the cycle.
The initial template for this novel consists of three distinct narrative arcs, separated by many years of realtime. Eventually two of the arcs fuse, and ultimately the remaining pair join as well for the climax. In the first thread, we re-encounter the protagonists of Redemption Ark. These folks are the crew and passengers of the sentient starship Nostalgia for Infinity during the year 2675. (Infinity houses the tortured consciousness of Capt. John Brannigan.) Having escaped their various foes—two sects of engineered humans called Conjoiners and Ultras, as well as the Inhibitors, ancient machines charged with destroying any star empires of a certain size—the people of the Infinity have settled on a watery world called Ararat, which happens to host a colony of the liquid intelligences known as the Pattern Jugglers. Chief among the Ararat cast is Scorpio, a pig-human hybrid who has emerged from the underworld of Chasm City to become a noble leader; Clavain, an ex-Conjoiner; and Ana Khouri and her infant daughter Aura, who was conceived inside a neutron star and gifted with premature wisdom and powers.
The second and third threads both concern the small world Hela, which orbits a gas giant planet called Haldora. We are witness to the discovery of Hela in 2615 by a self-serving explorer named Quaiche. Quaiche works for a cruel and capricious mistress, the Ultra captain called Queen Jasmina. Among Jasmina's favored toadies is the surgeon Grelier, who accounts Quaiche his rival. Quaiche's discovery of the enigmatic Hela will prove to be pivotal for the human race. Finally, in the year 2727, the year in which all the threads culminate, we are introduced to Rashmika Els, a bright 17-year-old girl on Hela who feels she can unravel the mysteries of her world. Mysteries that might save the human race from the Inhibitors.
Quaiche and Grelier, reluctant allies by the year 2727, now dominate the weird religious apparatus of Hela, which consists of moving cathedrals as large as cities that crawl across Hela in an eternal pilgrimage. Elsewhere, the lives of the people on Ararat have meanwhile undergone a radical transformation as both Conjoiners and Inhibitors battle for control of their planet. Forced to flee at sublight speeds on Infinity, Scorpio and his people arrive at Hela—pointed there by Aura's prophecies—just in time to take part in the crucial events that will determine whether the Inhibitors or humanity come to rule the galaxy.
A vigorous space opera
A professional astrophysicist, Reynolds writes a lean and muscular prose where the intense action scenes are leavened with the kind of bright, shining, mind-boggling science talk that characterizes the best of post-modern space opera. (Gregs Bear, Benford and Egan come to mind as prior instances of such quantum poetry.) Perhaps the best example of this occurs in Chapter 34 of Absolution Gap, when Scorpio and crew are introduced to the concept of "hypometric weapons." After paragraphs of explanation that tease the limits of understanding, Reynolds shrugs and says, "Simply grasping how such weapons were in some way disadvantageous to something loosely analogous to an enemy would have required such a comprehensive remapping of the human mind that it would be pointless calling it human anymore." This, then, is obviously one of the archetypical SF pleasures of Reynold's brand of space opera: the sense of pushing the envelope of conceptualization till it rips.
But Reynolds does not neglect more ancient brands of human interaction as well. Scorpio's loyalty to Clavain and the pig's inferiority complex; Ana Khouri's love for her child, however strange; pilot Antoinette Bax's self-sacrificial return to a doomed Ararat to be with her mate, Xavier Liu; the self-flagellation of Capt. Brannigan—all these emotional quandaries and more are given full weight equivalent to the physics and cosmology. And, in fact, it's the quotidian elements—loyalty, love, fear, faith: revelation, redemption and absolution, in short—that actually propel the plot at crucial junctures. Additionally, Reynolds in this book exhibits a flair for the kind of baroque grotesqueries that Alfred Bester was famous for utilizing. The torture device known as the "scrimshaw suit" employed by Queen Jasmina, the steampunkish outfit worn by the Ultra captain Heckel—these little touches add a Jacobean patina to much of the action.
How does this book satisfy as the culmination to some 2,000 pages of story? Well, it would have been hard for anyone to come up with a climax that could have outshone some of the prior magnificent set pieces. And, in fact, the final revelations and denouements of this book rival but do not surpass many of the earlier scenes from its predecessors. But in the end, the pleasures of this series are more to be found in the journey than in the ending, and Reynolds may proudly judge his work to have been well rounded and cathartically whole.
