Reynolds's vision of a future dominated by artificial intelligence trembles with the ultimate cold of the dark between the stars. Others, however, may find these human-cybernetic hybrid characters chilling, dispassionate (except for their built-in drives toward revenge and murder) and foreboding. Hard SF addicts will applaud the author's talent for creating convincing alien beings and the often uneasy merging of human and machine intelligence, depicted here as nearly too frighteningly real for comfort. Clearly intoxicated by cutting-edge scientific research-in bioengineering, space physics, cybernetics-Reynolds spins a ravishingly inventive tale of intrigue.
Set a century before the devastating effects of the melding plague, the book is able to showcase the golden age of mankind alluded to in earlier books. In Chasm City on the slum-ridden world of Yellowstone, assassin Ana Khouri joins the Nostalgia's crew-intent on killing Sylveste. The novel offers a thoroughly in-depth study of future technology, including augmented reality within the Revelation Space universe, owing its unique setting in the time-line. Aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, a vast light-hugger ship in interstellar space, the ominous Triumvirate of cyborg starfarers seeks Sylveste to heal its captain, afflicted by the deadly Melding Plague, which turns once-humans into their own semisentient spaceships. This distant-past/far-future, hard sci-fi tour de force probes a galaxy-wide enigma: why does spacefaring humanity encounter so few remnants of intelligent life? Excavating the 900,000-year-old Amarantin civilization on its home world, Resurgam, archaeologist Dan Sylveste discovers evidence of a splinter cult that abandoned Resurgam for the stars but returned, only to be swallowed up by a mysterious cataclysm that destroyed all the Amarantins.
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