Chasm City

Chasm City

By Alastair Reynolds

Part of the Revelation Space Book Series
Reviewed by Matt Crampton
Buy from Amazon Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare. Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas--Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity--and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies. The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasm_City https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/535287.chasm_city
Published in 2003
  • A Quantum Murder
    A Quantum Murder Dr Edward Kitchener is a brilliant researcher into quantum cosmology for the Event Horizon conglomerate
  • Absolution Gap
    Absolution Gap War veteran Clavain and a ragtag group of refugees have fled into hiding.
  • All Tomorrows Parties
    All Tomorrows Parties Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo.
  • Century Rain
    Century Rain Wendell Floyd is an expatriate American living in an alternate version of 1950s Paris
  • Count Zero
    Count Zero Two powerful corporations in a battle for control over a powerful new technology.
  • Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
    Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days While visiting the Monument to the Eighty in Chasm City, Richard meets his old friend Roland Childe