Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

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For the Evulz: Averted by most villainous characters, but played straight by the infamous dictator of the planet Haven, mentioned in Turquoise Days. Schizo Tech: A corollary of the Used Future/ Space Western setting, and the travel and communication lag times between worlds: colonies and even individual lighthuggers typically have a random hodgepodge of technologies available based on what new advances they have and haven't been privy to. As the reader expects, these threads converge, leading to revelations about Tanner's past, the truth Fish People: Denizens are an engineered sentient species created on Europa by mixing human and fish genes.

The Ultranaut crews (and pretty much anyone who takes a lighthugger from one planetary system to the other) can live very long lives thanks to the relativistic travel speeds of interstellar spacecraft, and further extend this with their culture of casual Transhumanism. The Prefect has been turned into the first book of a trilogy with the third book to come. Given that the first two are set in the pre-Melding Plague golden age Glitter Band with things just starting to go mysteriously wrong, anyone who has read the chronologically later books will know what’s coming (in general terms; presumably the point is to give the details of how the plague started). Warning: The series contains convoluted Plot Twists and reveals. The majority of spoilers are marked but read at your own risk if you have not read the series! Diamond Dogs” is set in Chasm City (partly), and Nightingale takes place on Sky’s Edge after the events of C.C. (fall of the elevator). “Grafenwalder’s Bestiary” has to be read after “D.D.” and “A.S.i.E.”, since the Denizens and Dr. Trintignant were introduced in those stories.Horde of Alien Locusts: The Greenfly. They become the new villain after the Inhibitors are defeated. Despite being just out-of-control terraforming devices, for some reason they're even more unstoppable than the machines specifically built to exterminate advanced civilizations. Diabolus ex Machina, anyone ? Ana Khouri is the most ordinary of the trilogy's main cast. Unsurprisingly, she's also technically The Hero. And she's the only major character who survives throughout the entire trilogy. If you don't count the good old Nostalgia for Infinity and captain Brannigan, that is... The Subaru Commonwealth colonies in the Pleaides star cluster, glimpsed in the short story Galactic North. They're a Juggler-less example. Only Smart People May Pass: The plot of Diamond Dogs is a deconstruction of this trope and the characters.

It felt to me that the science and characterizations were very subordinate to the fantasy/mystery aspects of the story. Characters would do things modestly inconsistent with their character because the story required it. The science seemed incidental, providing whatever was necessary as a framework for the mostly fantasy story. New Something: Common for the orbital habitats orbiting Yellowstone. Carousels (spinning habitats) named New Copenhagen and New Amsterdam are mentioned. Casual Interplanetary Travel: In developed systems like Sol and Yellowstone, planetary travel is fairly cheap. I was born in Wales, but raised in Cornwall, and then spent time in the north of England and Scotland. I moved to the Netherlands to continue my science career and stayed there for a very long time, before eventually returning to Wales. Inhibitor Phase (2021) - A novel supplementary to the main trilogy (chronologically set between the final chapter and epilogue of Absolution Gap) giving more detail about the human- Inhibitor war, in particular how humanity obtained access to Nestbuilder weapons.

The author himself has claimed that the ending to Galactic North, with the remnants of humanity fleeing the galaxy from the Greenfly is " quite optimistic, in my book ". Specifically, he compares that ending to past crises humanity has faced in real life. His perspective on the looming encapsulation of the universe is optimistic because there's still some time "...before things reach a crisis point again. And humanity will survive that, as well..." Seriously, I seldom see such masterful sleight-of-hand. Reynolds pulls off a reveal both complicated and potentially corny enough that it could have ruined the entire book. As it is, it deepened my enjoyment of Chasm City immensely. Suddenly this was no longer a simple tale about a super-soldier assassin on a quest for revenge. Instead, it was about a conflicted and very broken man slowly rediscovering his identity and realizing how little he understands about himself. Dilation Sleep” introduces Ultras and fleshes out how slower-than-light travel links the worlds in the R.S. Universe. Also references Sylveste family and the Melding Plague.

Not only do they kill the star, but they do so by first building a gigantic machine to take apart the system's gas giant, then use the material they recovered from that to produce the star-killing weapon - which is so large and so massive that a character notes it shouldn't even be possible for it to exist without collapsing in on itself. When they fire their weapon at the star, it doesn't just kill the star - it turns it into an astronomically huge Flamethrower. Also played straight and subverted by Calvin Sylveste, who had originally engineered Dan Sylveste as a clone of himself to make it easier to possibly imprint a copy of himself into Dan's brain. While he does do this near the end of the book (and already did it once), it's more of a two people/one body relationship. Edge, and Cahuella's wife Gitta (with whom he falls in love), and Reivich's attempt on Cahuella's life (in You've probably read the audiobook's description, and have made a general opinion. Well, stop there. You have NO IDEA how well this has been written for you, the listener. Tragic Bigot: Captain Van Ness from Weather (in Galactic North) hates Conjoiners because they converted, then supposedly killed, his wife. After it turns out that she lived, and left a message for him in the collective mind about how much she would always love him, his attitude improves a little.Defector from Decadence: Nevil Clavain. He defected twice in his life: First in The Great Wall of Mars, when he joined the Conjoiners after he had learned the Coalition for Neural Purityhad lied about their nature and only wanted to destroy them. Then, centuries later (during the events of Redemption Ark), he defected from the Conjoiners once a younger and far more radical inner faction (led by Skade) had taken over and wanted to leave the rest of humanity defenceless against the Inhibitors, instead of offering help.

Uplifted Animal: The hyperpigs and hyperprimates. Nobody's actually sure why the pigs happened, with theories ranging from genetic engineering to make them more compatible human organ donors that went a little too well, to a deliberate attempt at creating a Slave Race. They vary in degree of sentience and human-like anatomy and are usually either abused menials or criminals. The origins of the hyperprimates aren't discussed, but they seem to have it a lot better: though they also do menial labor, they have a tight-knit community/very strong trade union such that no sane human wants to piss them off. Stealth in Space: Humans discover a loophole in thermodynamics that they use for this. Before that, they sometimes can fake it for short periods of time by using ships with very tightly collimated thrust. A Hard Sci-Fi Space Opera series by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds, where 26th century humans have achieved advanced nanotechnology and slower-than-light interstellar travel and find themselves needing to discover why all the other intelligent species they find evidence of seem to have gone mysteriously extinct. Great future science, good characters, super-twisty plot, terrific writing, wonderful narration - this is a killer good audio book!Chasm City shares the same universe as many of Reynolds' other novels, but I believe they are all stand alones. Fans of big scale hardboiled space opera should like this book. Space Pirate: The Banshees pretty much fit the bill and are a thoroughly unromantic version of the trope. The Ultra(naut)s often have elements of this, but are not necessarily antagonistic. Flying Car: The volantors of pre-plague Chasm City. Some examples appear directly in the opening chapter of Diamond Dogs. In the third book of the Revelation Space trilogy, the Inhibitors are finally wiped out; however, it is implied that their absence is what allows a swarm of von Neumann machines to eventually consume literally the entire universe. As such this also counts as an Inferred Holocaust.