lucasw's Journal: Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds

In the The Years Best Science Fiction 17, there was a story by Alastair Reynolds called Galactic North. Up until that point I had read short stories and no matter how good they were, I never really bothered to follow up and see if the novels from same author were equally readable. After Galactic North, I picked up Revelation Space as soon as I could find it (annoying delays between releases in the UK and US slowing that process down...), and Chasm City soon after.

What's interesting is that the major events of all three of the novels (as well as the upcoming Absolution Gap) barely occupy a couple paragraphs of Galactic North, and pale in significance to the greenfly plague... A few character appear in or are mentioned both in Gal North and Redemption Ark (the conjoiner Rementoire and space pirate Run Seven, respectively).

Redemption Ark is inferior slightly to Chasm City in a few respects, but the treatment of technology and ideas, as well as the space battles, make it highly worthwhile.

I liked the fued between Skade and Clavain, but Antoinette Bax didn't seem that engaging. It's difficult to make anyone a villain, the villains typically have loftier longer term objectives, while the protagonists sometimes sacrifice their people and resources selfishly for others they are personally attached to.

The message Reynolds is trying to make is that at some point every moral choice comes as a conflict between the needs of the present/individual and the future/community- and the closest thing to evil arises from mindless submission to either extreme.

The events pick up a few decades after Chasm City and Revelation Space (which had little overlap, but are tied together here), and hundreds of years after most of the Clavain stories. Mostly it takes place in the Yellowstone system, the Delta Pavonis systems, and the interstellar space lying between. I enjoy tremendously the style of pacing that accounts for relativistic travel- plot lines are intermingled as if they were simultaneous, but really are set up in a way so that the conclusion is synchronised, and the prior events were years or decades apart upon until one set of characters get on an interstellar ship and join the other set.

(spoilers)

One minor disappointment- I would have like to hear about the hell-weapon assault on the Inhibitor device: There's just a throwaway line about the weapons, for all their planet-busting ferocity, having had no effect at all.

The horrors of state-four vacuum are overstated. There are a few other instance like this where Reynolds explains to the reader how horrible something is, and then actually describes it, but the two don't quite match up. I'm reminded of Lovecraft's style, where much of each story is the narrator or characters talking about how (conveniently) undescribable and mind destroying some elder god is, but the payoff where we read a first hand account is something of a let-down. For this vacuum state business, we get someone's life being erased with only others in nearby remembering their existence, and it happens twice almost exactly the same way. There's also reference to whole species being retroactively destroyed, and perhaps are remembered by aliens in neighboring regions of space.

I would have found it more convincing if the state-four vacuum had different effects each time, rather than just the life/species destroying properties. We get one description, and then another on Skade's ship that's exactly the same- couldn't there be something more disturbing (but perhaps similar) caused by alterations to the past? Why does the alteration always involve the death of the experimenters at some point earlier in the past, why not have them having made previous choices differently that don't bring them into contact with the experiment (however more mundane that is, shouldn't it be equally likely?).

I'm not quite sure on the chronology of Rementoire- after he's shot in the assault that kills Run Seven, he later ends up in the mother nest and with Skade etc. and the event of Ark proceed?