Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds

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Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds
pub: Gollancz. 567 page softcover. Price: £10.99. (UK). ISBN: 0-575-06880-9.

Redemption Ark is the third novel set in the same universe as Alastair Reynolds's somewhat splendid Revelation Space and Chasm City (one of which deservedly won the British Science Fiction Award, as I recall).

The plot sets up a number of different characters in a very complex universe, managing to carry off the original Star Wars trick of throwing a melange of groups and back-history into the mix so fast you feel you've walked into a twenty part series of Flash Gordon during episode eighteen, having totally missed the first seventeen.

Of course, we are now two books into the series, but these are very stand-alone novels, and only a couple of the characters from the last book get a direct carry-over.

The human colonized section of the galaxy has suffered a terrible blow after the Melding Plague has swept through it - an alien disease which corrupts nano-technology and sends the tech haywire, merging with human flesh where it can.

Humanity has fallen into a near dark age, with a war being fought between the two main factions ... the Demarchists; normal humans, and their enemy, the Conjoiners. The Conjoiners are a borg-like hive-mind who can link minds and parallel process their thoughts at a greatly enhanced speed.

The hyper-intelligent Conjoiners have stopped the production of FTL drives for decades - a real problem, as none of the rest of humanity understand how to make them. Battles are now being fought for the last of the interstellar drive vessels trading among the stars.

The mystery of why the Conjoiners have banned FTL-travel proves one of the driving plot-lines of the book. Along with the true motives of a bunch of killer machine life, the Inhibitors, who have just turned up with the view of making humanity extinct.

The race is on for a stash of lost Conjoiner technology, hell-class weaponry which nobody alive even understands any more. Imagine the talking bomb in the movie Dark Star - then give it the personality of Hannibal Lector - and you have some idea of what a hell-class puppy can do.

These weapons, as readers of the earlier books will know, are on the plague ship Nostalgia for Infinity, which is still hanging around the small colony planet of Resurgam. The only problem is that as a result of Melding Plague, the vessel is possessed by a barking-mad suicidal Captain, who has been cruelly warped into the very substance of the ship.

Redemption Ark is an absolutely cracking page turner. Reynolds manages to blend the space opera of Iain Banks with a Stephen Baxter-like enthusiasm for the beauty of advanced physics turned to quantum weaponry, and combines the whole act with the scale of a Greg Bear spectacular.

If you are the busy sort who rations your SF reading to, say, only five books a year, make this one of them for 2002!

Stephen Hunt.

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