Revelation Space

Rather than start a fresh novel this week, I've fallen back on an old favourite, choosing to reread Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space.

Monomaniac archaeologist Dan Sylveste has given up his pampered life on Yellowstone in favour of the backwoods world of Resurgam, the better to study an extinct alien race called the Amarantin. Apparently primitive, the Amarantin show hints of greater sophistication, causing Sylveste to worry about the nature of the ancient solar flare that wiped them out.

Nor are solar flares all Dan has to worry about. Having kidnapped a new gunnery officer — exposure to the hideous cache weapons having driven the last one mad — the crew of the Nostalgia for Infinity are hot on his trail. They hope to persuade Sylveste and the simulation of his father Calvin to fix their Captain, currently afflicted with a particularly nasty nanotech plague. Their gunnery office, naturally, has different ideas.

A wonderful blend of gothic and space opera, I think Revelation Space is probably my favourite of the eponymous series, but I suspect this is merely a matter of personal taste. I like the way that the novel jumps in with both feet, the opening scene at the archaeological dig site establishing Sylveste's utterly focused mania, his prickly relationship with Calvin's simulation and the wobbly politics of Resurgam. I love two of the main characters, Sylveste and Volyova, mirror each other in their obsessive nature and their refusal to see the obvious until someone else points it out, while Pascale and Ana mirror each other as the voices of reason.

I also like the way the novel is so pregnant with tension, the way that things are hinted at, rather than rendered explicit. The darkness of the past is only every allusive: Sylveste's missing eyes, suggestions of the Captain's horrible crimes, Volyova's hints that she's already used the cache horrors. The bleakness of the future is foreshadowed in a way that makes it very clear that even though no one seems to know precisely what is coming, they know it's completely implacable and inimical to humanity.