To The Last Page

I was surprised to find that not everyone took to Alastair Reynolds’ YA-oriented space pirate adventure Revenger , although it was admittedly a little bit of a departure for the author. Personally, I found that it suited Reynolds’ tendency towards pulp SF much better and, despite its teenage female narrator voice, Revenger told a very dark tale indeed in Arafura Ness’s search for her missing sister Adrana, who had been abducted by the notorious pirate Bosa Sennen and was being tortured and reconfigured to become her successor. Yes the spaceships with sails, the nautical terms and the piracy references might have all been a little laboured, but Reynolds nonetheless was imaginative in his creation of how this world operated in terms of physics, but - more importantly - in how it established a place for great space adventure. There was clearly room for further development of these ideas and they are extended, with a couple of new twists and turns, in Shadow Captain , the follow-up to Rev