Chasm City

Chasm City – Novel, Science Fiction – [0736 – 2017-02-20]

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds is a science fiction novel and is also known as book 2 in the 5 book (so far) “Revelation Space” series published during 2000-2007. Curious readers may ask can this novel be read without reading the prior book “Revelation Space”. In truth yes it can but your enjoyment and the comprehension of story events would be greatly enhanced if you had read “Revelation Space”. Fortunately there is an authors introduction to this book that may or may not help new readers.

In this long novel, my paperback was 694 pages with a small font, one Tanner Mirabel – a solider-of-fortune – persists against overwhelming odds to hunts down an individual, Argent Reivich, that killed his friends. In my opinion the plot is almost immaterial to the author’s elaborate descriptions of Chasm City, it residences and the circumstances of it’s creation and de-evolution. Another sub-plot that I found most interesting is the story of Sky Haussmann founder of his Tanner Mirabel’s home world, Sky’s Edge. Tanner experiences Haussmann story through virus-induced flashbacks.

This is an elaborate and detailed science-fiction story that kept me up many evenings. Alastair Reynolds crams an encyclopedia of background in this novel that induced this reader to read book 3 “Redemption Ark”. I am not exaggerating when I use the term encyclopedia. The Wikipedia has numerous pages on the characters, factors and locations of Revelation Space. Readers are strongly encouraged to check out the information – I was impressed, indeed.

Mr. Reynolds, with his Ph.D. in astronomy is a master at technological extrapolation. Therefore this story exhibits many “hard” aspects of hardware type science-fiction that will cause long time fans weep with joy and others to whimper with annoyance.

There was a lot of classic gumshoe-style detective work in this that detracted from Reynolds’ excellent sci fi world building, and it felt over-long by about 200 pages. Great twists-and-turns, just took a bit too long to get where it was going. It would also have been nice to have some female characters with actual development. Overall another great effort, but not one of my favorites due to the long interludes of filler.

I was recommended to read this stand alone title as a “sample” of the larger, more expansive series. I can safely say that I am glad that I did before buying the rest. This author’s prose is flat. Boring. Bland. Blah. And the dialogue! The dialogue is so atrociously bad.

To summarize this novel; a try hard nerdy noir thriller with characters about as inspiring as a piece of lint.

Author is very easy to read and engaging. I read the other two books in the series first and was more engaged by the light huggers and rust belt. Chasm City seems separate from the first two books in several ways so it is difficult to resolve how it fits into the universe introduced and developed in the other two books in the series. You might want to skip this one if you were hoping it would build characters from the other two books.

In “Revelation Space”, Alastair Reynolds introduced a nanotechnology-dependent culture that had been damaged profoundly, if not beyond repair, by the Melding Plague, a disease that destroyed the implants and shortened the near-immortal lives of the citizens of Yellowstone. In “Chasm City”, we get a first-hand view of Yellowstone just after the Plague hit through the eyes of Tanner Mirabel, a mercenary pursuing his last adversary from the frontier world of Sky’s Edge.

When Tanner wakes up on Yellowstone, he’s lost most of his memory, a result of years of refrigerated sleep in transit. But as he follows his target through chaotic post-Plague Yellowstone, being hunted himself in a local “game”, he not only causes problems for the local power structure but becomes less and less sure he actually is who his records say he is. Not only, thanks to an implanted virus, is he experiencing memories as if he were Sky Haussman, original commander of the settlement on Sky’s Edge, but he has memories that Tanner Mirabel can’t actually have had. When it all comes together – or falls apart – it’s in a climactic confrontation with the man he thinks he came to kill in the first place, and the man who might or might not be himself.

Displacement and isolation- both Tanner’s and Sky Haussman’s- is a theme Reynolds explored in “Revelation Space,” but he adds to it here the question of identity- to what extent are we the people we present to others as opposed to what we actually think and do, and how capable are we of becoming someone else by an act of will? These are not new questions, especially with respect to the soldier looking to escape his past- there is a throwaway quip about “making furniture out of their bones” that will get a chuckle of recognition out of Iain M. Banks fans – but they’re well-done and multi-layered here.

So why only four stars and not five? In large part because there’s a lot, but not a lot new, happening here. Space opera; identity theft; lone gunman; manhunt as game; revenge mission; anti-technology virus. Perhaps it’s the fact that all of these show up in one not-particularly-long book that gives ‘Chasm City’ the sense of being slightly wandering and unfocused. By the end of the book, we’re not so much surprised as relieved that any given plot point has been resolved, and in the end that weakens what could have been a much stronger story.

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