To The Last Page

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...

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...

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 ...