Posted: 1757595600 |
Mark Webster
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"
Machine Vendetta" by
Alastair Reynolds returns to the
Revelation Space universe - home of
Chasm City, and the Glitter Band - with another "Prefect Dreyfus Emergency" novel.
Set entirely around the orbit of the planet Yellowstone, and following on from the events in 2007's
The Prefect (which, incidentally, I accidentally rebought when it was republished as
Aurora Rising in 2017) and 2018's
Elysium Fire, events in the Glitter Band - a huge collection of habitat satellites functioning as city states - threaten to upset the balance between Aurora and The Clockmaker, two sentient AIs locked in a stalemate, embedded in the computer networks of the Glitter Band.
Events in the Glitter Band threaten to upset the balance between Aurora and The Clockmaker, two sentient AIs locked in a stalemate.
While dealing with the political fallout from an unprovoked attack on a vulnerable habitat and investigating the suspicious death of one of their own, Panoply is already overstretched. This new threat pushes them to breaking point.
Reynolds delivers another masterclass in world building. The Glitter Band is fully realised organised chaos, with individual habitats and their inhabitants being expertly drawn without slowing the story to a crawl with pages of exposition. The main protagonists are largely unique, but maybe a little quick to show willingness to sacrifice themselves on occasion.
As the tension is expertly ramped up throughout the novel, the investigation becomes more urgent, and various hands are forced. Who is manipulating whom?
Just when I thought the novel was about to end - setting up a cliffhanger for the next installment - I realised there were still about 80 pages left. Avoiding spoilers, I'm not sure how I feel about how this book draws to a close, and I'm not entirely convinced by how it played out, but I can also see that, perhaps, it would not have stretched to another book.
Machine Vendetta is an excellent character driven, hard sci-fi, space opera, police procedural that rarely lifts its foot off the gas. It can stand proud along the previous volumes in the series, and will not disappoint fans of Reynolds' previous work, though newcomers may want to start with an earlier entry in the series before venturing into the Glitter Band.
5 stars, recommended.
Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds is published by Gollancz.
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