Alastair Reynolds

"Your skull is a stained-glass window, an open book revealing the processes of your mind": Nominally a kind of police procedural for those already familiar with Reynolds' Revelation Space setting (although it takes place during the Belle Epoque, long before the Machine Plague). Actually, it's something like an extended meditation on the possibility of democracy under conditions of extreme pluralism. It also explores the (unresolved, or perhaps unresolvable) tension between modes of show more democratic self-governance at a grand scale, on the one hand, and the blend of old aristocratism and new developments in machine intelligence, on the other hand. Can democracies of whatever scale survive their elites without a guardian class (the Prefects of the novel's original title)? Or maybe you really can't stop what's coming. show less

An epidemic of exploding heads, and a rabble-rousing demagogue trying to foment Space Brexit, are the two flies in the ointment of the Glitter Band, a swarm of space habitats whose citizens vote on everything, mostly without giving it a conscious thought, via brain implants. Charged with extracting said flies (could they by any chance be linked?) is Panoply, the light-touch police force whose day job is keeping the constant elections free and fair. Can grizzled noirish Detective (sorry, show more "Prefect") Dreyfus, aided by puckish rising-star deputy Thalia Ng and cynical hyperpig Sparver Bancal, unravel the mystery before the Utopian federation of the Glitter Band is wrecked by self-interested secessionists? And if they do, will any of its inhabitants still have an intact upper deck? Read this book to find out!

But only if your tolerance for comic book villains who explain their motives before offering someone a sadistic choice, disjointed pacing, and plots gummed up with procedural manoeuverings and too-long flashback sequences is greater than mine. It doesn't help that I'm way more into the kind of galaxy-spanning space opera Reynolds gives us in the Revelation Space trilogy than cop stories, but I still don't think this is a very good example of the latter. Noggins going nova will always be an exciting premise (although slightly less so when "beta-level" copies of their owners can be resurrected for evidential purposes) but none of the characters here are very interesting, least of all Space Brexit dude and the perma-harried top cop "Lady" Jane Aumonier whose main purpose is to trust the hunches of Dreyfus. And even then, we learn early on that the upper-limit for cranial detonations is like 2,000. Hardly the end of the world in a populace of tens of millions! show less

It’s the year 2080 and life on earth is all but gone, the soils sterile, the oceans empty. First to go were the insects, then green plants, marine life, all life; only a final dwindling generation of humans are left, half-starved and living on the last of the stored foods. So a project has taken shape, a single desperate attempt to save the day: the idea of Permafrost is to reach back through time more than half a century and retrieve the contents of one of the many seed-banks which still show more existed back in the 2020s, underground vaults dotted around the globe where the planet’s plant life, in effect, was being preserved. Something else that no longer exists by 2080 is countries (ahhh, if only… Much as I’d love a real-life time machine, “no countries” might actually do us a lot more good) and the only large-scale organisation left is World Health. They it is who are running the time-project from a base on the frozen rim of the Arctic Ocean where the great Siberian river Yenisei runs out into the sea.
   Permafrost is tricky to follow early on; there are scenes involving the same characters and locations, but in different decades, before it’s really clear where (or when) any of them belong, and I read the thing through twice over. Also, the kind of time travel involved is unusual—no simple Time Machines or Time Tunnels here, but (full marks to the author) something more ingenious and less direct. It’s well worth the effort though as this is a very good read, particularly if, like me, you have a soft spot for time-travel stories anyway.
   Admittedly there are (or may be…perhaps) a couple of inconsistencies in the structure: that fly for instance, for anyone who’s read it already, and those crows. Like many time-travel novels though, this one involves circles in time with events looping back around to alter themselves, and here time almost seems to have a mind of its own, gently shifting and settling to its simplest possible state to smooth away such paradoxes—even your memory of them. Which left me sitting here after my reread wondering if it had been exactly the same book second time around, or had altered in the meantime. I’ll never know. show less

This is a truly entertaining sequel to "Revenger," intelligent and compelling from the start. I like that this world Reynolds has created here is a very "lived-in" one, banged up around the edges with socioeconomic inequality, industrial junk cast about, and dialogue rife with idiom and slang (like real people use); really, there is a "Firefly" vibe to the 'verse here, and characters that also seem real and dynamic. The action is quick, there's no dumbing-down going on, and it's really hard show more to put this down.

I'm giving SC 4 stars rather than 5 because, unlike R, it can't work as a stand-alone novel and because it dwells a bit too long in an unsavory and limited gangster-run place, slowing down the movement so characteristic of R. It IS a Book Two, with a cheeky cliffhanger ending, but doesn't suffer from middle-book syndrome, and it most definitely answers lingering questions clarifying matters of history and of the nature of the worldlets comprising the Configuration.

This is a damned fine summer read. show less