Dan Sylveste is the son of one of Resurgam’s founders, the infamous leader of the Eighty, the unwitting victims of a bungled immortality experiment. Resurgam is now a human colony wracked by political upheaval. The story revolves around the quest to discover what led to the extinction of the Amarantin, a pre-technological race that once inhabited the bleak world of Resurgam, orbiting Delta Pavonis. But if, in a manner of speaking, Reynolds can’t see the trees for the forest, you can’t deny that it’s an astonishing forest. It’s the big picture that matters to him. So not only does the cast never fully reach the point of perfect reader identification/empathy, it seems that Reynolds knows it and couldn’t care less. The complaint is more akin to that hilarious line from Amadeus: “Too many notes!” Clearly Reynolds’ universe is more important to him than his characters. But there’s nothing anywhere that could be called bad writing. Passages go on at g-r-e-a-t length to elucidate some aspect of Reynolds’ extravagant future. Reynolds has so many Big Ideas to communicate to his readers that he falls into the hard SF writer’s most commonplace trap: the infodump. Yes, I still acknowledge its imperfections. Revelation Space turned out to be a book I was simply not ready for until I’d reached a certain point in my own reading and reviewing journey. The dark, eerie corridors of the vast starship Nostalgia for Infinity still brought haunting images to mind. Years later I still could remember the opening scene in the archaeological dig on the lonely planet of Resurgam with remarkable clarity. From initially finding the novel far too lumbering and pretentious, I have since decided Reynolds is one of my very favorite space opera writers, and it’s all because even from my first, flailing attempts at wrestling with this book as far back as 2002, as much as I felt I disliked it, I could simply not get certain passages and scenes out of my head.
I have now read it multiple times, and it’s fascinating to me to look back and see just how much I had to get up to speed to fully appreciate Reynolds’ sense of scope. Monumentally ambitious in that specific way only universe-spanning space opera can be, Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space launched a massive future history to beggar the imagination.
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