The span of Alastair Reynold's universe, where what's become of our species, other intelligences and terrifying machines interact just a few centuries hence against a backdrop of conflict spanning billions of years, is staggering.
It's scarcely surprising to find that the Welsh writer (his site) last month gave up his other job in post-doctoral science at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. In the past four years, Alastair has published as many vast adventures, gradually unveiling different elements in what is proving to be an immensely engrossing struggle for the very survival of intelligent life in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and perhaps beyond.
The first part of this opus, 'Revelation Space' (showered with praise here in January) was a complex blockbuster in its own right, but that "undercurrent of menace and increasing danger" I mentioned at the time was but a prelude to the greater revelations and time-games to come.
In the wake of 'Chasm City', a monumental novel which is neverthless but what we journalists would call a "sidebar" to the hard news story of a not-so-distant future, the only thing to do was to plunge straight on into 'Redemption Ark', where Reynolds reveals rather more of his hand concerning the nature of the cataclysmic disaster that awaits the part of the universe we call "home".
For Amazon UK (the book link), David Langford has succinctly summarised some of the author's preoccupations:
"Chasm City's complications include spectacular space-elevator sabotage, faulty antimatter drives, hidden aliens, mystery drugs, exotic bio-modification, tailored disease, high-tech weaponry, a new and deadlier form of bungee-jumping, and that traditional SF symptom of decadence: organised hunts with human prey. Violent death is never far off, but our protagonist [a well-trained warrior named Tanner Mirabel] has deeper worries in that his own motives and memories, even his identity, don't seem to add up quite as they should..."
This was the book that earned Alastair the British Science Fiction Award and was hailed at the time in a perceptive review by John Clute at SciFi.com:
"Tanner--who tells the whole of Chasm City in a tough-guy first-person lingo taken from the kind of noir private-eye novel usually set in mid-20th century California--is a man desperately in need of help. Following his linguistic model, Tanner is rude, resentful, bullying, haunted and very, very thick. He is run from pillar to post by every other character in the book. He guesses nothing as fast as his slowest readers will have. He insults and betrays everyone who wants to help him."
Right enough. As Tanner slowly finds out who he is in a once glorious hi-tech city poised on the edge of the gaseous gulf from which it takes its name, Reynolds works the art of character development with skill, not only for his anti-hero but those who haunt his mind. This is especially true of one Sky Haussmann, the criminal coloniser of a planet that bears his name, and when a practising doctor, Frazer Anderson, tells us (again at Amazon) that "the portrayal of Sky's slide into psychosis is one of the best I have read", who am I to argue?
Yet the tale set in Chasm City, ravaged and reshaped by the Melding Plague, "not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two," left me disappointed after I was done with it — before heading into 'Redemption Ark', which altered my perception and appreciation of the strengths of this "interlude" in more than 600 densely packed pages!
A writer who started out rich in insight into the complex workings of our human consciousness — the way sometimes incomprehensible, deeply irrational impulses can drive our actions, the fascinating interaction between our emotions and our memories that is currently a broadening field for researchers into both theoretical psychology and hard-wired neurology — in 'Chasm City' Reynolds more directly tackles a host of moral issues he'd only begun to explore alongside the solid grasp of such "hard sciences" as physics, astronomy and chemistry used to such brilliant effect in 'Revelation Space'.
With 'Redemption Ark', Alastair further draws the psychology and ethical questions inherent our behavour together with those hard sciences in a way which demands one heck of a lot of brainwork from his reader. Rarely have I read a novel which is so challenging, where the author forces you to stretch your intellect and dig so deep into your own resources to reap the immense rewards delivered in return.
At times, I could really have done with some of the accelerated thinking techniques bestowed on key characters among Alastair's Conjoiners, the hive-minded people who gave space-faring humanity the starship drives some of our other descendants have adopted for their own craft, but with precious little comprehension of what makes the engine work! Reynolds the scientist seems as at ease with relativity, quantum physics and probability theory as Reynolds the magician, who conjures up not just one but several decisively alien cultures and states of consciousness in such convincing fashion that he's right up there with the grand mistresses and masters of Otherness.
Meanwhile, we discover that those "hell-class" Doomsday weapons of such importance to the rivals in 'Revelation Space' are endowed with minds of their own. And here, we encounter anew some of the characters, human or alarmingly mutated by the Plague, not to mention the remarkable pigs we first meet in 'Chasm City'.
If you want a foretaste — with spoilers, be warned if you're new to Reynolds — of what happens in 'Redemption Ark,' that Amazon link given above is full of it.
I'm not into spoilers, having written enough in my previous Reynolds review about wayfarers, lighthugging spaceships, obliterated alien cultures, Shrouders and Pattern Jugglers. What Alastair does with these and other elements, plus a whole cast of well-written new characters, in 'Redemption Ark' should not be revealed in advance, not if you'd rather be launched half-blind into the "turbulent, wildly entertaining ride" fellow novelist M. John Harrison commends on the cover and in his write-up for 'The Guardian'.
Harrison makes this third book sound like a space-opera romp with science which makes sense at the cost of character. While I had no problem with the people and their hard-edged exchanges, I'll freely admit that my own rate of consumption was sometimes closer to a crawl, with about-turns to reread some of the tougher, more mind-stretching passages thrown in. Several times, Alastair's riveting writing had me reeling into sleep, simply unable to absorb any more ideas, though I had to go on until my attention turned itself off and I woke up to find the book on the floor on one side of the bed — and my glasses worryingly absent from where they should be on the shelf but fortunately found unbroken in the morning.
On the behavioural codes of conduct already hinted at, this is the part of the opera where Reynolds — with only occasional digressions into anything recognisable under the label of "religion" — gets deep into consideration of a notion which has perplexed scientists and philosophers alike since first we started to think: free will.
As its title suggests, 'Redemption Ark' is at one level a profound book about morality, salvation and choice. How do we behave, indeed how should we behave as people, when confronted with increasingly overwhelming evidence that the future is already a known disaster zone and there's damn all we can do about it? What price, then, on intelligence and endeavour?
I'm impatient to get my hands on 'Absolution Gap' and learn how Alastair builds on this theme, among many others, but I'll wait for the paperback — which won't take very long now. None of the few notices I've read make mention of Nevil Clavain, "Butcher of Tharsis", double defector, and pivotal to the tale of the ark and the fate of the planet Resurgam as a man confronted with some of the book's most difficult choices. All I know for sure is that there's more of Nostalgia for Infinity, the starship Reynolds first subjected to an intriguing transformation in 'Revelation Space'. Where she — or is it he? — flies, I'm bound to follow.
Harrison is one of the reviewers to put Reynolds on the same stretch of bookshelf as Philip K. Dick, not I think, solely on account of its "frenzied imaginative space", but also the dark threads that run through this work.
A more unlikely parallel nagged at me when something in this writing hurled me back many years to that odd, convoluted academic C.S. Lewis. I don't mean those 'Narnia' chronicles I remember with far more fixed feelings than the simple pleasure they gave me when my mother read them to her kids, but the author of that singular set, 'Out of the Silent Planet', 'Perelandra' and 'That Hideous Strength' (worthwhile Wikipedia entry).
It's not that Reynolds is into Christian allegory, far from it, despite the Biblical references in his titles — if it's myth he draws on at all, then it's a strain running even deeper than the archetypes bound into that monotheistic creed. Gothic, cyber-Gothic, steam-punk, a host of etiquettes have already been pinned on the fellow...
"I can't really analyse these things," Alastair admits in an interview with Duncan Lawie for 'The Zone'. "Redemption Ark was a title I'd had kicking around in my files for a long time before I attached it to that novel. That sounds odd, but I think a fair few writers do this - they often have titles that they know they need to use. I guess they're fairly useful for the imagery. I'm not interested in the standard clean-cut space opera characters that are un-redeemably good or bad. I do like the idea, as a story mechanism, of characters that have done something atrocious or terrible in the past and are trying to atone for it."
Plenty of core characters in these three books are like that, and we meet the messianic and the saviour types too. From among the varied and vivid descriptions of places fantastic, here's a teaser on one where somebody
"sensed herself become plural. From out of the sea fog, from a direction she could neither describe nor point to, came a feeling of something receding into vast, chill distance, like a white corridor reaching to the bleak edge of eternity. The hairs on the back of [her] neck pricked. She knew there was something profoundly wrong about what she was doing. The premonitory sense of evil was quite tangible."
Astrophysicist, philosopher, weaver of nightmares, delver into dreamscape, maybe the label I'm groping for to slap on Alastair when he's not watching is "theologian", in a universe where God is cold stone dead.
At this stage in the evolution of our odd little species when scientific research and philosophical ideas which can seem refreshingly new and very old ceaselessly cross paths, along with conventional religious notions undergoing a radical overhaul, a writer of the calibre of Alastair Reynolds offers us very much more than exciting entertainment.
6:57:41 PM link
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