Redemption Ark (Gollancz S.F.) [Paperback]

Redemption Ark is Alastair Reynolds's third hefty SF novel, a direct sequel to his debut book Revelation Space, and also linked with Chasm City, which won the British SF Association Award. Gripping high-tech action features various groups struggling for control of a cache of "hell-class weapons", while the alien Inhibitors--who stamp out space-going intelligence wherever they find it--are busy dismantling planets to build a doomsday engine of awesome size.

Building on the previous books, the interstellar situation is exhilaratingly complex. Major players from Revelation Space are still at large in the solar system containing the new Inhibitor construction site, the vast old starship Nostalgia for Infinity (hideously transformed and merged with its captain by "Melding Plague"), the hell-weapons, and the colonized planet Resurgam--which may need to be evacuated at speed.

Many light years away, the mechanically enhanced human Conjoiners are fighting a space war around Yellowstone, the world of Chasm City. Although victory approaches, the Conjoiners are frantically building advanced starships and planning to run for their lives, thanks to an incredibly dangerous project that sucked information from the future--including news of the Inhibitors. The Conjoiners have their own internal factions, at least one of which isn't what it seems, and a fresh split leads to a tense relativistic race for the Resurgam system and those coveted hell-weapons. Booby-traps and deadly strategems enliven the desperate journey.

Other, non-Conjoiner humans--not to mention machine intelligences and genetically engineered man-pig chimeras--are caught up in the intrigue and violence. Many members of this large cast have inner secrets, other identities, painful relationships, long-concealed guilt. As at last they converge on the Resurgam system, there are jolting surprises.

Meanwhile, the immense past and future of Reynolds' universe becomes clearer, a cosmic tapestry with the deep-time scope of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee series, ranging from the Dawn War in the early aeons of galactic life to a cataclysmic event still three billion years in the future. A disaster which the loathed robotic Inhibitors are working patiently to minimise....

Despite minor glitches in story logic, Redemption Ark is a hugely enjoyable and ambitious interstellar epic, a must-read for fans of SF that operates on a truly colossal scale. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The Inhibitors are back and Humanity is doomed! Many, many millennia ago, the Inhibitors seeded the universe with machines designed to detect intelligent life - and then to suppress it. But after hundreds of millions of years, the machines started to fail and intelligent cultures started to emerge. Then Dr Dan Sylveste and the crew of Infinity discovered what had happened to the long-vanished Amarantin race . . . and awakened the Inhibitors. On Yellowstone, where no one is quite who they appear, the Inquisitor and the planet's Most Wanted War Criminal are watching as the Inhibitors turn a small group of planets into raw materials. Whatever they are building with those materials is not going to be good for Humanity. Once again, Al Reynolds has produced a stunning, universe-spanning space opera of mind-blowing proportions. Big in size, big in concepts, REDEMPTION ARK will leave you gasping at its audacity and breathless at its conclusion. This is British SF at its absolute best.

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy. Since 1991 he has lived in the Netherlands, near Leiden, where he works as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency. The first three books in his loosely linked series, Revelation Space, nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke and the British Science Fiction awards, Chasm City, winner of the British Science Fiction Award, and Redemprion Ark, are all Gollancz bestsellers.