Reviews & Overviews by Rod Cameron

        

Redemption Ark - Alastair Reynolds The Inhibitors have returned, don't make any long term plans.

Redemption Ark is the third instalment of Alastair Reynold's excellent space opera that started with Revelation Space and continued with Chasm City. Set fifty years after Revelation Space, where an ancient alien alarm system was triggered, the Inhibitors, a machine intelligence are coming to prevent the emergence of intelligence in this sector of the galaxy. The hero is Clavain, a Conjoiner the feared and persecuted human hive-mind consciousness. For four hundred years they has been fighting a brutal interplanetary war, but something has struck terror into the Conjoiner Inner sanctum. As he begins to understand the nature of the threat, Clavain begins to wonder if it isn't time to defect. Clavain and a misfit band of allies race towards Resurgam where a long-lost cache of intelligent doomsday weapons are located. Clavain intends to recover the weapons for the good of humanity. Pitted against him is a friend turned enemy, Skade. She is an embittered rival conjoiner who has her own agenda, and will do anything to get her own way. Of course Clavain has more to worry about than Skade. Not only are these the weapons that we first met in Revelation Space, controlled by the war criminal Triumvir Volyova who has her own plans for them; but the weapons themselves are not exactly lacking in free will... This is space opera at its best. Inscrutable aliens, complex and conniving villains and awkward bombs (as in the film Dark Star). Some series start to tail off after the first book. No worries here. This story is well written, and is compulsive reading. If you have finished Chasm City, look no further. This is a series that looks as if it will run and run. But if you haven't read Alastair Reynolds before, then go out and buy Revelation Space on an urgent basis.

Publisher: Gollancz Date: 2002 Pages: 567 Price: £17.99 Format: Hardback ISBN: 0 57506 879 5 Reviewed by: Rod Cameron Review Date: September 2002

Copyright : Roderick Alasdair Cameron 2001 - 2012                   rod@rodcameron.co.uk