Now, this is what I call space opera: huge ships exchanging any number of ravening beams of destruction, implacable alien menaces, doomsday weapons, plucky heroines and heroes fighting desperate odds.Oh, yeah, this is the big time!All of the familiar elements of Reynolds' fiction are here, from the miraculous but corrupted and decaying technology to the once-glittering but now rather rusty civilisations and the damaged individuals hoping for some sort of redemption. Not to mention the various clades of humanity still managing to survive, despite themselves.Redemption Ark is set in the same universe as Revelation Space and Chasm City but roughly half a century after. Thanks to reefersleep, time dilation and nanotechnology, many of the characters from these two books are still alive and well. Certainly the Inhibitors — lupine machine intelligences that seem to have patrolled our galaxy since it was young — are very much 'alive' and well. So well, in fact, that they're beginning to turn their glacial attention upon the human race with a view to wiping us out, as they've wiped out all other intelligent life for millions of years.The Conjoiners, arguably the best (and certainly the most technologically advanced) aspect of humanity, are now split over what to do about the Inhibitor menace. Having secured their own existence by easily defeating the other main human faction in a pointless war, they're now making contingency plans to secure an even longer term future. But the old warrior Clavain (whom some may remember from an earlier Reynolds story, 'Great Wall of Mars', in Spectrum SF 1) is suspicious of the motives of Skade, the head of this project. Why is there so much secrecy smothering the new Conjoiner technological initiatives? Why, after a century's moratorium, has star-drive manufacture now been restarted? And what is the Conjoiner Closed Council so terrified of? (I'm not giving too much away when I say that it might be the Inhibitors).Meanwhile, on the planet Resurgam — Reynolds books always have more than one seemingly-distinct thread in them — where conclusive proof of the existence of the Inhibitors was first discovered (in Revelation Space), Ilia Volyova and Ana Khouri, late of the lighthugger 'Nostalgia For Infinity', have forced to change their own plans by the arrival of the first wave of Inhibitors in the system. Fortunately, the Inhibitors seem to be ignoring the regressive human colony — or are they just thinking bigger…?Redemption Ark is a great work of sf. We know Reynolds can write intelligent stories and build depressingly believable future societies, but now he seems to be getting the hang of writing realistic characters too. Clavain, in particular, is a likeable, intelligent and complex figure, but his opponent, Skade, is not simply a two-dimensional foil either. Both of them are striving towards the same long-term goal — it is mainly their methods that differ. Skade's drive towards her goals, semi-exposed later in the book, eventually reveal her to be as much a victim as anyone.Similarly, the reasoning behind the Inhibitor mission — rather oddly, given that every character who encounters them speaks of their Lovecraftian evil — is shown to be morally rather more complex than, say, E.E. 'Doc' Smith would have allowed with his fearsome villains.As with all of Reynolds' books, this is a long one. However, it doesn't ever drag or feel padded out; rather it is exactly the right length. The ending leaves you sated but ready for the next installment. The end of Redemption Ark is only the end of the first skirmish in the war against the Inhibitors. I have the feeling that the best is very much yet to come…
REVELATION SPACE
CHASM CITY
REDEMPTION ARK
The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Skade looped around it in a helical pseudo-orbit, her corvette’s thrusters drumming a rapid tattoo of corrective bursts. The starscape wheeled behind the ship, the system’s sun eclipsed and revealed with each loop of the helix. Skade’s attention had lingered on the sun for a moment too long. She felt an ominous tightening in her throat, the onset of motion sickness.
It was not what she needed.
Irritated, Skade visualised her own brain in glassy three-dimensional complexity. As if peeling a fruit, she stripped away layers of neocortex and cortex, flinging aside the parts of her own mind that did not immediately interest her. The silvery loom of her implant web, topologically identical with her native synaptic network, shimmered with neural traffic, packets of information racing from neuron to neuron at a kilometre per second, ten times faster than the crawl of biological nerve signals. She could not actually perceive those signals moving — that would have required an accelerated rate of consciousness, which would have required even faster neural traffic — but the abstraction nonetheless revealed which parts of her augmented brain were the most active.
Skade zoomed in on a specific locus of brain function called the
Skade knew there was no point blaming her brain for making her feel nauseous. The hallucination/poison connection had worked very well for millions of years, allowing her ancestors to experiment with a wider diet than would otherwise have been possible. It just had no place here and now, on the chill, dangerous edge of another solar system. She supposed it would have made sense to erase such features by deftly rewiring the basic topology, but that was a lot easier said than done. The brain was holographic and messy, like a hopelessly overcomplicated computer program. Skade knew, therefore, that by ‘switching off the part of her brain that was making her feel nauseous, she was almost certainly affecting other areas of brain function that shared some of the same neural circuitry. But she could live with that; she had done something similar a thousand times before, and she had seldom experienced any cognitive side effects.
There. The culprit region pulsed pink and dropped off the network. The nausea vanished; she felt a great deal better.
What remained was anger at her own carelessness. When she had been a field operative, making frequent incursions into enemy territory, she would never have left it until now to make such a modest neural adjustment. She had become sloppy, and that was unforgivable. Especially now that the ship had returned: an event that might prove to be as significant to the Mother Nest as any of the war’s recent campaigns.
She felt sharper now. The old Skade was still there; she just needed to be dusted off and honed now and then.
[Skade, you will be careful, won’t you? It’s clear that something very peculiar has happened to this ship.]
The voice she heard was quiet, feminine and confined entirely to her own skull. She answered it subvocally.
[Have you identified it? Do you know which of the two it is, or was?]
Now that she had swept around it, a three-dimensional image of the ship formed in her visual cortex, bracketed in a loom of shifting eidetic annotation as more information was teased out of the hulk.
[Galiana’s? The Galiana’s? You’re sure of that?]
The presence took a moment to respond, as it sometimes did. [That was our conclusion as well. But something has clearly happened to this ship since it left the Mother Nest, wouldn’t you say?]
