Friday, 26th of March, 2004

Alastair Reynolds, I have to admit right away, is one of those sf authors with whom I correspond (being a good fanboy), and indeed I recently received an email from Al enquiring about certain properties of the double bass, an instrument which seems to play a bit part in his next novel. He thought that as I was a string player I might have some idea; exciting - I shall be appearing the acknowledgements of said novel, Century Rain, which sounds like it’ll be wonderful.

Absolution Gap closes, for now, the sequence of novels set in the Revelation Space universe. Readers of Interzone perhaps, or of Gardner Dozois’ Best New SF collections, may be aware that this universe has a very definite cap to it via the novella “Galactic North”, in which rogue self-replicating terraforming machines eventually dismantle and reconstruct the entire galaxy, in effect turning it all green (and uninhabitable, mind you)… Fun! This is rather slyly alluded to in Absolution Gap (When I mentioned my delight at this, Al wrote: “Thanks - I was very keen to keep consistency with GN, even if only about 3 people on the entire planet even realise.”)

Absolution Gap exhibits all of Reynolds’ favourite themes: way-out physics (Reynolds is an astrophysicist himself); cosmic battles; very warped characters attempting to find peace with their pasts (or not, as the case may be); cognitive science; nearly-incomprehensible alien artefacts; faith-inducing viruses; plot strands separated by time, converging in the end with slippages in personal identity… It’s all here.
And mostly it works beautifully as always. There are some stunning creations, such as the glass-blower whose creations are so fragile that they can only survive in zero-gravity, and even transporting them from their place of origin can destroy them.

There are initially three strands: the first takes off from where Redemption Ark finished, with Clavain, Scorpio and co on the Pattern Juggler world with Captain Brannigan’s transformed spaceship Nostalgia For Infinity (was ever a spaceship better named?) growing spookier by the second, while in the skies above various human factions fight an increasingly abstruse space battle. [Let me point out now that despite the delights of the two relatively-independent other strands, there's no point reading this book if you haven't read Revelation Space and Redemption Ark at least... So, apologies if all these references are arcane and unfamiliar - just go read his other stuff! Chasm City isn't so essential here, but it's a brilliant novel all the same...]
In the second, a man named Quaiche, infected with a virus that tries to force a religious impulse on him in times of stress, works for a group of very twisted Ultras who seem to be taking Goth culture to its natural cyborgised extreme. Quaiche has a traumatic experience on a mysterious world, which, followed by a seemingly miraculous event, pushes him (literally and metaphorically) into a chasm from which he can no longer escape his faith virus’s hold.
Meanwhile, in the third strand an extremely resourceful teenage girl called Rashmika Els, living on a moon called Hela, finds herself drawn to run away from her parents’ village (well, it’s sort of a village) and make her way to the astounding procession of cathedrals that endlessly circles the world. She goes ostensibly to find out what happened to her brother, but it doesn’t take long for us to figure out more is afoot, especially regarding Rashmika’s obsession with the Scuttlers, a race long extinct (exterminated?) on Hela. Rashmika is a delightful creation, a bit like one of Terry Pratchett’s little girl characters, and she is a great relief next to the almost infinite cruelty of Skade, who makes a final and enormously tramatic reappearance in the first storyline.

The way Rashmika’s and Quaiche’s strands come together, and eventually the third one too, is as effective and satisfying as Chasm City’s craftsmanship. Along the way acts of inhuman torture and savagery sit next to touching human stories, an intriguing perspective on the world of Hela is created for us, and the way rumour and news spreads in a huge but relativistic universe is explored. However, something just doesn’t seem to sit right with the novel as a conclusion to the Inhibitors storyline. Humanity, it seems, is being judged, and the events on Hela that caused Quaiche’s miracle are part of it. But perhaps due to the exigencies of the multi-stranded plot, too much of the mystery is kept in the shadows (so to speak) for too long, and not enough foreshadowing is made of the other agency apparently involved (via the Remontoire/Clavain/Scorpio/etc strand). Everything ends up being resolved, as this guy puts it, “in like literally the last 3 pages”.
The blurb tells us that “…a dark and unsettling truth becomes apparent: to beat one enemy, it may be necessary to forge an alliance with something much, much worse…” But other than very vague hints at genocides on all parts, little is revealed about the various shadowy alien species involved in battling or hiding from the Inhibitor threat. It remains unclear by the end, it seems to me, why the particular choice that is made is the right one. Perhaps Reynolds’ point is that our destiny is dependent, right down to the details, upon contingency. That seems to be the message of “Galactic North” too, and if so, then fair enough. I was left more than a little mystified though.

In the same email quoted above, Al acknowledged that I’m not the only one to be unconvinced by the ending, but people “differ as to whether the rest of the book is adequate compensation or not - some feel it is, some (unfortunately) feel it isn’t.” Well, I certainly feel that there is plenty in this book to justify the overarching storyline’s discomfiting conclusion. There is a lot of beautiful metaphorical imagery that enriches the various plots points along the way, and Reynolds’ skill with characterisation grows better with every book.
I have to recommend the two-novella collection Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days though. I have both separately; “Diamond Dogs” describes the bizarre and very disturbing exploration of a mysterious alien artefact, and connects with the rest of the Revelation Space universe in surprising ways (there’s a throwaway line about it in one of the last two novels - I wish I remember where!) “Turquoise Days” may be my favourite Reynolds work yet, an elegiac tale of a Pattern Juggler world where one of the minds dissolved in the sea may be too dangerous to be allowed to remain…
Al Reynolds remains one of the most exciting sf novelists around, and I for one can’t wait for Century Rain (ostensibly coming out in October this year!)

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