Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

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am i to believe this story was truly about redemption when sky, cahuella, and the protagonist were all villainous assholes, only for the protag to become a Good Guy in a 3-page epilogue? The first follows a security operative, Tanner Mirabel, as he hunts a fugitive through what was once humanity’s greatest and most advanced civilisation, now reduced to a tangled, twisted slum by a disease that preys on nanotechnology. I'd also like to note that although the main characters (Tanner, his former boss Cahuella, the infamous Sky Hausmann) are well drawn and motivated, it's very hard to root for any of them: the true representatives of dehumanized technical society, don't look for a hero to follow in this book. En esta novela Reynolds sienta las bases del universo que crea de una manera más fácil de entender y mejor estructurada que en Espacio Revelación y te prepara para lo que viene después.

I give it TWO STARS for further delving into the Revelation Space world, and for being well-written at a sentence-by-sentence level, but needs much editing and plot-tightening to become a truly engaging novel. They do not live, nor breathe, nor have any life of their own aside from the author's every manipulation. The more inventive method Reynolds uses is an "indoctrinal virus"—which is pretty much what it sounds like.

the richest immortal folks do the weirdest shit to their bodies, and you ask a striped woman if she always looked like this? And nano machinery that made art of buildings was infected to transform the city into something grotesque and treelike. While the story is not epic in scale as it mainly focuses on the protagonist’s adventures it is set in a brilliantly imagined universe. CLARKE AWARD; REVELATION SPACE, ABSOLUTION GAP, DIAMOND DOGS and CENTURY RAIN were shortlisted for the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD and CHASM CITY won the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD. Tanner's quest in Chasm City is hampered by the fact that the region has become infected with the Melding Plague.

A character recovering from amnesia certainly is a tried and true method of revealing someone's past, but Reynolds manages to make the amnesia fit into the story in a logical way; the amnesia doesn't come across as a contrived excuse.

How has this man changed to warrant his continued life and the final chapters describing him in terms of the redeemed anti-hero? We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

John Lee as always does a solid job on the narration — he is well suited to the dark tone of the book and has chemistry with Reynolds ' work.By then, Haussmann has become a cult leader with a fanatical following, and his fans carry and spread a nanovirus that gives people visions of Sky and his life. Some of my books and stories are set in a consistent future named after Revelation Space, the first novel, but I've done a lot of other things as well and I like to keep things fresh between books. I didn't think we'd find anyone that good again after Banks died, but then I read the Inhibitor Series and was immediately sucked into Reynolds' story telling and world building in very much the same way.

downhill in the sense when sky’s personality does a whole flip from weird-kid-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder to torturer-and-mass-murderer in just a few scenes. Scenes of Tanner's murderous quest alternate with scenes of Sky's life, which Tanner sees whenever he nods off. which brings me to my next point: to say that there are no complex, competent women in this story would be doing a disservice to all the male characters who also lack all complexity, but this story does employ a few utterly annoying sexist tropes. It is definitely a shining example of what good science fiction can be, proof that one can engage with meaningful issues without sacrificing story. One of the characters, the name I forget ( some kind of mushroom I think ), performs a startling about-face and happily joins Tanner Mirabel ( the 'hero' ) along with some other previous Tanner haters in their final battle against the 'end-of-level' baddie.Like the first Revelation Space book, the first half of the book was build up with the second half ramping up the pace with twists and counter twists that will have your mouth hanging open - well mine was anyway. Suspecting that perhaps the vessels of the fleet broke into outright conflict in the past, only for this to be erased from history, and that this ghost ship is a derelict shell, he leads a small expedition to it and finds something even stranger and more frightening than he could’ve imagined. When hamadryads approach adulthood, they wrap themselves around trees and meld with the trunks, becoming part of the structure of the plant.