In recent years, the United Kingdom has been a hotbed of outstanding science fiction, and Alastair Reynolds is one of that county’s most interesting talents. Reynolds has been one of the exemplars of what has often been dubbed the “New Space Opera,” combining wide-scale interstellar adventure with a greater concern for scientific accuracy and detail. Reynolds, who spent more than a decade working as an astronomer for the European Space Agency before becoming a full-time writer, is admirably suited to that task.
Reynolds published his first short story in 1990, but first came to prominence in America with the publication of his debut novel, Revelation Space, the first part of a trilogy that continued with Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Set in the same world as these stories are the novels Chasm City and The Prefect, along with the story collections Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and Galactic North. Together, they encompass a future history starting just a few centuries from now and extending tens of thousands of years into the future.
Though the stories are almost all set within a very small portion of our galaxy, Reynolds does a better job than almost any other author of conveying the staggering immensity of interstellar space. There is no faster-than-light travel or communication, only a network of interstellar trading ships called “lighthuggers,” bringing news from other worlds that is always years or decades old by the time it arrives. Aside from this trickle of information, every human planet is alone. Time, too, is displayed in all its grandeur. The story that forms the core of the central trilogy has its roots billions of years in the past, while the realities of relativistic travel across light years carries Reynolds’ characters ever farther into the future.
Reynolds uses this huge canvas for stories on variety of scales. In Revelation Space and its sequels, Reynolds chronicles the discovery and struggle against a horrifying threat to human survival born billions of years in the past. Chasm City tells the story of a man seeking revenge in the ruins of the world of Yellowstone, once the jewel of human space, now a shadow of its past self due to the Melding Plague, a devastating nanotech weapon that decimated the population and forced the abandonment of any advanced technology the plague could corrupt. The novella Diamond Dogs is a horrific story of a band of explorers who seek to unlock the secrets of a bizarre alien structure on the world of Golgotha.
One of Reynolds’ prominent traits is that many of his stories have a strong element of the eerie, unsettling, or horrifying to them, from the seemingly conscious malevolence of the Golgotha artifact, to bizarre causality-twisting technological mishaps that erase people from history, to the vast and creepily lifeless interiors of the enormous lighthugger spacecraft, to the lighthugger crews themselves, transformed to the point of inhumanity by cybernetic implants and cut off from normal human perspectives as their relativistic journeys carry them ever-forward in time while generation after generation of mayfly planet-bound humans live, age, and die. Even the basic nature of the setting itself, with each isolated human world vulnerable and alone in the vast gulfs of space, is effective in creating an almost Lovecraftian sense of disquiet, and Reynolds exploits that fact with great skill.
Reynolds speculations on science and technology are continually fascinating. Human “Conjoiners” augment their intelligence and form themselves into group-minds with neural implants, supercharging their brains to the point of requiring coolant systems to disperse the excess heat, while “Demarchists” use augmentation to connect their minds directly to the decision-making process of their governments and allow each citizen direct access to affairs of state. Reynolds exploits his own scientific background and knowledge to the hilt, and manages to make the often-arcane scientific concepts he deals with – quantum super-positioning, brane cosmology, zero point theory, and the Fermi paradox – digestible enough for the reader to follow.
Reynolds’ creativity extends beyond the world of Revelation Space, in independent stories in the novels Century Rain and Pushing Ice and the short story collection Zima Blue. He has also appeared in recent anthologies, including The New Space Opera and One Million AD, Galactic Empires, and Forbidden Planets. I highly recommend his work to anyone interested in science fiction, with either Revelation Space or Galactic North as the best places to start. With some British science fiction authors, such as Neal Asher and to a lesser extent Stephen Baxter, American audiences face the problem of some of that author’s books being only intermittently available or completely unpublished in the United States. Fortunately, Reynolds’ work has been readily available in America, usually not too long after it is published in Europe.
Alastair Reynolds does an outstanding job of combining large scale-adventures, scientific speculation, and a touch of the horrific, and is definitely a writer that science fiction fans should keep an eye on.
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