Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space

   

         Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space is a brilliant first novel.  The story’s central figure, archeologist Dan Sylveste, has spent decades researching the Amarantin.  The Amarantin were a civilization on the verge of spaceflight when their sun flared up and wiped out their entire race.  The Event, as it is referred to by Amarantin researchers, was deemed little more than a cosmic hiccup.  Sylveste believes otherwise, and is devoted to discovering what really brought about the end of Amarantin civilization.  What follows is a story of truly epic scope and presumably dire consequences for humanity in the sequel novels.

            Revelation Space opens with three seemingly unrelated narratives, and it is the earliest parts of the novel that are weakest.  Sylveste has just found an Amarantin obelisk.  Former soldier turned assassin, Khouri, is on the hunt.  By the 26^th century, the rich and bored have taken to having assassins come after them in a competition of sorts, survive or die.  The last protagonist is Volyova, the tech specialist for a crew of Ultras, cybernetic space pirates essentially.  Volyova and company are on a mission to find a cure for their captain who has succumbed to a cyber-organic illness referred to as the Melding Plague.  For the first hundred or so pages, Sylveste’s storyline is by far the most interesting, the other two storylines seemingly inconsequential.    

Khouri and Volyova’s storylines eventually begin to intertwine with Sylveste and it is here where the novel really begins to pick up.  Khouri infiltrates Volyova’s ship in hopes of killing Sylveste.  Unlike her earlier assassinations, this one is no rich man’s game.  Her employer has a vendetta against Sylveste that is only slowly revealed over the course of the novel.  It is through Khouri that the reader first gets a glimpse of the Dawn War, Inhibitors, and what Sylveste’s research could mean for the entirety of humanity.  However, just went it seems all will be revealed, Reynolds expertly darts away from the topic, keeping the suspense going.  Volyova’s conflicts were her corrupt crew and dealings with her infiltrator are no less fascinating.

When the full history of the Dawn War and its aftermath is revealed, the implications are staggering.  The only survivors of the Dawn War, the Inhibitors have spent countless millennia systematically wiping out and preventing the evolution of life in the universe.  But now their machines are beginning to fail, and civilizations like humanity and the Amarantin are rising.  How many other civilizations are there still in existence?  Whether or not Sylveste triggered the Inhibitor device at the end of the novel is left unclear, but given that there are sequels, it’s safe to assume he did.  Which begs the question, how will humanity fare against a race that has been eliminating life since before humanity’s ancestors first walked on two legs?

Sylveste’s ending is lackluster, but a minor gripe with what was a very enjoyable read.  Sylveste has become one with the matrix of a giant stellar supercomputer created by the Inhibitors.  The parallels to an afterlife are obvious, but it’s a disappointing ending to a character’s galaxy spanning journey.

Revelation Space is most certainly a successful first novel, and would make a fantastic addition to any science fiction reader’s library.  Despite a slow start and a disappointing ending for its central figure, the novel is a compelling look at the Fermi paradox and humanity’s place in the universe.