two stories from the revelation space universe. ( )

This is a collection of two novellas, loosely related by the universe they are set in. I remembered it being recommended to me by someone, and picked it up eventually, but I can't say I'm that impressed or likely to read any more.

The first story, Diamond Dogs, is about a team of people setting out to explore The Blood Spire. The Spire is a mysterious object on the edge of explored space that is nothing but a set of progressively harder and harder mathematical puzzles that may, or may not, lead to a wonderful prize. The punishment for an incorrect answer starts with wounding, works up to maiming and ultimately death.

All of which might have been interesting if the puzzles had been described so that the reader could try to figure them out. But that's not the point - they are so fiendishly complex that it takes an artificially stimulated, alien modified brain to even begin to understand them. Ok, so the story must be about the characters, right? Well, most of them are stock images and fairly rapidly disposed of. So it must be about the alien technology of The Spire and the prize? Nope. The spire is a malevolent McGuffin and nobody ever gets to the prize.

In some way it reminded me of a pale shadow of Hyperion, as if all the characters were missing any interesting motivating force.

Turquoise Days is a better story. Set of the world of Turquoise, where an alien organism called "Patter Jugglers" lives in a planet-wide sea. The main character, Naqi, studies the jugglers and lost her sister to them when they swam in the sea and her sister's mind/identity/self was absorbed into the organism.

Turquoise is a relatively isolationist world, but they are visited (for the first time in a century) other humans who want to study the pattern jugglers, or maybe exploit them or... In this case the story of what all the different groups - two different factions of visitors, scientists, Naqi - want from the pattern jugglers and hope to achieve makes for a fairly interesting story.

There is one hint that a particular piece of technology in Turquoise Days may have come from The Blood Spire, but not necessarily from the expedition chronicled in Diamond Dogs. Beyond that there is no particular tie between the two or reason to package them together. Turquoise is the much better of the two, and I'm glad I didn't let the failure of the first put me off completely, but even so, I don't expect I'll be looking for any more. ( )

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds (2005)

http://yet.org/2008/03/diamond_dogs_t... ( )

Combining two shorter stories turn out to be to Reynolds advantage. Some of the trouble I've had with his former work includes pushing things for too many pages only to resolve it all in the last five. This format suits him better as the short five page solutions can now be used without feeling like he is cheating. ( )