A None-page book by Alastair Reynolds

The Barnes & Noble Review
You want space opera? You got it! Alastair Reynolds’s Redemption Ark, the shelf-bending sequel to his debut novel Revelation Space, can only be described as colossal. Taking place approximately half a century after the events in Revelation Space, this ambitious epic pits the Demarchists (normal humans) against the Conjoiners – Borg-like, genetically enhanced humans who have experimented with cybernetically assisted direct mind-to-mind communications. After a nano-disease called the Melding Plague knocked humanity back into a near dark age decades earlier, the war between human factions has become the focus of humanity all over the galaxy. But when the Inhibitors, ( a seemingly unstoppable alien race of self-replicating black machines that could wipe out humanity once and for all) reappears, the war is suddenly not such a priority for the few who know about the invaders.

Humanity’s last hope may lay in the hands of Neil Clavain, a legendary military leader whose mission is to recover a stolen cache of hell-class weapons, doomsday devices that were built in the earliest days of the Conjoiners and were judged to be so dangerous that the knowledge of how to construct them was suppressed. The cache is traced to the Resurgam system, but Clavain isn’t the only one looking for the weapons

Reynolds’s series, which also includes the related novel Chasm City, is reminiscent of Frederik Pohl’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning Heechee saga in both scope and quality. Fans who like their science fiction hard and on a grandiose scale will delight in Reynolds’s high-tech, ultra-complex universe.
Paul Goat Allen