In a book involving interstellar travel it’s natural to feel like intrastellar distances are no big deal. One of the things I admire about Reynolds’ universe is that it mostly adheres to the iron laws of science and space-time, and properly instils in the reader a sense of just how vast it is. Redemption Ark, which continues the trilogy proper, explores the first real contact between human beings and the alien machines they come to call Inhibitors, as the predators arrive in the same system as the sparsely populated planet Resurgam – where most of Revelation Space took place, and from where the Inhibitors’ warning system was triggered – and begin deconstructing the moons of a gas giant to provide themselves with the raw material to build something else, which the characters surmise will be some kind of gargantuan weapon. Chasm City, a prequel, told a standalone story in which the threat of that machinery is only briefly touched upon, in an eerie encounter with an alien which describes how its own species has been harried to the point of extinction. Revelation Space, the first novel in a future history Reynolds had been writing in short fiction since the 1980s, ended with the revelation of a dire threat facing humanity’s nascent interstellar society: the provocation of an ancient galactic machinery set in place to wipe out intelligent life. Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds (2002) 646 p.
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