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Alastair Reynolds has been known to dip his toes into other genres besides the space opera science fiction he is known for. When I say dip into, that means literally just flirting with the conventions of crime fiction and historical adventure, but always within the science-fiction world. Sometimes more obviously than others - Eversion had me confused for a while - although to my mind those have all been successful ventures. Although Halcyon Years flirts with noir then - more parodies than flirts with really - it's clear nonetheless right from the outset, when we find out that we are dealing with private investigator called Yuri Gagarin, that this is another genre-with-genre exercise - and again a fairly entertaining one, very much on the pulp side of his SF writing. Future noir is nothing new either, but it needs to work hard not to fall into parody. Reynolds doesn't seem like he is too concerned with that, creating Gagarin Investigative Enterprises, a small time operation wi...

Picking up the pace a little - the first Prefect Dreyfus novel The Prefect was published in 2008 and later repackaged as Aurora Rising in preparation for the continuation of the series in 2018 with the second book Elysium Fire . Machine Vendetta looks to be the third and final part of the series, and if it ends here, it wraps up the trilogy rather neatly, following through on some of the underlying issues and wider problems being dealt with by the law-enforcement service for the Glitter Band, the Panoply. The Panoply are not so much a law-enforcement authority however as a kind of federal agency that ensures that the democratic process of polling cores on each of the thousands of habitats in the Glitter Band around Yellowstone are not tampered with in any way. Outside of that, the habitats have their own autonomy and Panoply only intervene when there is a serious matter that violates the Common Articles and could impact on other habitats. Not everyone accepts their authority but mos...

A few chapters into Eversion and I had to double check that I hadn't downloaded the wrong book. At first I assumed that the ship that Dr Silas Coade is on would turn out to be the usual kind of ship you find in Alastair Reynolds books: a spaceship. The old-fashioned accoutrements and surgical implements didn't necessarily suggest anything different; after all, the Revenger series plays with piracy in a similar steampunk space adventure level. But no, the longer you read, the more it does seem like Reynolds has turned his hand - quite successfully - to historical fiction. All however is surely not what it seems... For a while however, the journey remains on the high seas. Silas Coade is an assistant surgeon aboard a fifth rate schooner, The Demeter, a private enterprise travelling into the frozen north in search of a mysterious Edifice. A previous expedition, the Europa, has discovered the construction that is reportedly to be found in a lagoon concealed behind a fissure in a ...

A return to the Revelation Space universe is always good news for Alastair Reynolds fans. It's a rich universe that always has potential, not least in the existence of the terrifying entities called the Inhibitors, also known as wolves. As pretty much invincible AI technology whose only purpose is to eradicate the human race from every corner of the universe where they can find it, this is almost guarantees a thrilling adventure in every encounter. In Inhibitor Phase , it's more of an undercurrent of threat than an encounter, with humanity now down to a few remote outposts, trying to keep themselves hidden, fearful of what might happen should the wolves be alerted to their presence. That's the case for the small outpost of five thousand souls on Sun Hollow, who since they have no contact with anyone else, might as well be - and could even be - the last remnant of humanity in the universe. So when a ship approaches and risks alerting the wolves, they have no option to destro...

After a middle-volume hiatus that involved little more than our reluctant space pirates arriving on a new world and getting off it again, there’s some hope that the third volume of Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger series might get back to resolving some of the mysteries and intrigues that have arisen over the previous two books ( Revenger , Shadow Captain ). And it does, but in a book that feels considerably longer than the previous two combined, Bone Silence takes us on a slow and not always gripping journey to an outcome that at least feels appropriately grand in scale. But first the fearsome bauble hunters turned space pirates the Ness sisters, Fura and Adrana, and their diminished crew need to find new bones: alien skulls from an ancient unknown civilisation long before the current Occupation of the system that can be used by those skilled and gifted enough to communicate across distances. They settle for Mulgracen, hoping to arrive incognito with no upsets, but there was never much c...

Alastair Reynolds’s short stories and novellas can be seen as a testing ground for other ideas that lie outside the author’s varied space opera, space adventure universes of the Revelation Space, Revenger, Inspector Dreyfus or Poseidon’s Children series. A testing ground however doesn’t necessarily mean experimental since if anything Reynolds tends to turn to the shorter works in order to try his hand at other traditional SF tropes, some inspired by pulp science-fiction, and some inevitably work better than others. Permafrost is Alastair Reynolds’ latest novella-length story and it’s very much within a science-fiction field that Reynolds has only touched on before; time travel. To make a time-travel adventure credible requires some hard-science work on quantum physics, and Reynolds is bang up-to-date on recent developments on sending electrons back from the future in that field. It also requires some measure of creativity to explain the complexities and paradoxes that will inevitably ...

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...

I think I can see why Alastair Reynolds has decided to expand on his earlier novel The Prefect (repackaged as Aurora Rising ) and come around to the idea that there are more adventures to tell within the ranks of Panoply, the organisation responsible for monitoring the democratic process within the Glitter Band in the author’s Revelation Space universe. I’m not sure why I hadn’t noticed it before (perhaps because there’s less of a mass killer-robot distraction in this one), but the parallel of the role of the Prefects trying to uphold federalism and democracy within the Glitter Band becomes much more obvious in Elysium Fire when the question of “the will of the people” of a handful of worlds wanting to “take back control” through autonomy arises. To put it another way, it seems like there is going to be what you might call a ‘Glexit’ crisis. That however isn’t the main problem that the agents of Panoply have to deal with in this second Prefect Dreyfus novel, although as you’d imagine...

There are various sides to Alastair Reynolds’s work, although personally - with the exception of Pushing Ice  - I’ve yet to find anything that measures up to his initial Revelation Space trilogy of novels (and even there I’m not quite as fond of Chasm City as the other two books). One interesting recent development however is his YA novel Revenger , which seems to be continuing in the forthcoming Revealer , but just as promising is the author’s expansion of the Revelation Space universe in his Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies series. Be warned however, this first book in what is now being extended as a series was originally published in 2008 as The Prefect . At the time, The Prefect didn’t strike me as one of Alastair Reynolds’s best books, but perhaps that was judging it by the expansive scale and rather more imaginative ideas of the other Revelation Space universe books. The Prefect is more in keeping with the pulp-SF origins of Reynolds’s short-fiction and on a level of action and...

Alastair Reynolds is full of surprises, which I suppose is something you would like to think of as an ideal quality for a science-fiction writer. Whether its sprawling epic family dramas over a series of books ( Poseidon's Children ), hard-SF action drama (the Revelation Space  series), pulp-SF ( The Prefect ), short stories or one-off fiction ideas, there is always some new aspect of science to explore in relation to physics, time, technology, space travel, robots, alien life and humanity's place within it.  Reynolds' most recent work was a collaboration with Stephen Baxter ( The Medusa Chronicles ) that expanded on an Arthur C Clarke story to consider the future relationship between man and technology, so his new approach to his latest work Revenger comes as something of a surprise. The surprise is not so much in the content as the style. In terms of content, Revenger  is very much within the Alastair Reynolds vision of the universe. There's a little bit of a family ...

Alastair Reynolds' epic generational and universe spanning new trilogy, Poseidon's Children , is undoubtedly an ambitious one, but like the elephants that form such a part of Blue Remembered Earth , the first book in the trilogy is slow and ponderous as it sets about establishing a background for the far reaches to be explored later. There are some great ideas that make the journey worthwhile - as there often is with Reynolds - but the long-drawn out trail for answers makes it something of a slog to get through. Blue Remembered Earth introduces the Akinuya family, a wealthy family who in 2161 run a successful technology business, one that the mysterious adventurer Eunice has done much to establish. Two of the youngest members of the family have chosen a different direction however, Geoffrey in Tanzania working on research into elephant behaviour using mind-link technology, Sunday - his sister - an artist living on the Moon. Following the death of the matriarch Eunice, the busi...

There's an element of fanboy excitement in Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds taking up the challenge of continuing the adventures of Arthur C. Clarke's space explorer Howard Falcon in The Medusa Chronicles , but there's another relevant reason for doing it. The hero of Clarke's 1971 novella A Meeting With Medusa was cybernetically rebuilt after an accident piloting a balloon, the mechanical enhancements permitting him to take part in the first manned mission to Jupiter. The spirit of the novella was partly boy's own SF adventure, but like most of Arthur C. Clarke's work, it dealt with the need to continue with the advancement of scientific investigation and exploration, and through it to better understand and develop the capacity of mankind. Science, technology, cybernetics and biological enhancements have advanced considerably in the time since Clarke's original novella, and a lot more is known about the planets in the solar system and about what lies b...

Wonderful though Reynolds' Revelation Space novels are, you could argue that particularly in regards to his more recent work, he seems to operate or a freer, more imaginative and simply more expansive manner in the galaxy spanning books outside his more famous universe. That was certainly the case with Pushing Ice and now with House of Suns , he finds another way of compressing time and space on an unimaginable level across millions of years (and light years) through the agency of a race of cloned humans of the Gentian Line. The Gentian line have been around long enough to observe and record the vast changes that take place in the galaxy, watching cultures come and go, intervening when asked to create Star Dams using the ancient technology of the advanced Priors, but primarily seeking information about the mysteries of the universe. Campion and his consort Purslane have however inadvertently stumbled upon a piece of information that someone doesn't want revealed, a secret that...

Even though it is set in the Revelation Space universe there is a sense in The Prefect that this is Reynolds in sci-fi pulp form rather than the hard literary science-fiction and expansive scale of the other books in the series or of the remarkable Pushing Ice . It does at least mean that the book is certainly more accessible, rarely faltering in pace and managing to hold the reader throughout. The plot is not an intricate one, although it does initially start out as one kind of police investigation by the Prefect Dreyfus of Panoply (the law-enforcement system or at least the authorities in charge of the upholding of the democratic process of the ten thousand habitats of the Glitter Band), looking into the destruction of one of the habitats and over 900 people and finding that behind it there is a threat on another scale entirely. With megalomaniacal computer entities, killer robots, invading forces threatening to sweep across the whole of the Glitter Band, internal rivalry, espionage...

The short story format isn’t where Alastair Reynolds can be seen at his best. The stories in the Galactic North collection all feel like minor episodes in his Revelation Space universe, lacking the complexity and scope of his novels. Only the title story Galactic North attempts to cover the epic scope of eons and history, but it suffers from compression into the short story format. Moreover, since there is a necessity for them to be read standalone, most of the stories tend to fall back on recognisable plotlines with sci-fi horror twists and shock endings that show their influences much more obviously than the authors extended works. (An interesting postscript by the author is quite open and forthcoming about this). On the positive side, the stories are all very readable, showing the variation that Reynolds is capable of, and his strengths with characterisation and exciting, dynamic plots. Anyone familiar with Reynolds’ work will recognise many of those characters and situations from...