Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

Product Information

Tanner’s actual hunt for Reivich always seems to meet obstacles and get him side-tracked in true action-movie fashion. En esta novela Reynolds sienta las bases del universo que crea de una manera más fácil de entender y mejor estructurada que en Espacio Revelación y te prepara para lo que viene después. One of those books that I massively enjoy having read, past tense, but ultimately didn’t enjoy while reading. Neither of the main characters is a likeable guy, and one is downright disgusting and despicable (in case you need to know). Normally that sort of thing doesn't sit well with me but it works much better in a dark context than in a humorous or other lighter context.

In the midst of his hunt, he begins experiencing virus-induced flashbacks from the life of Sky Haussmann, the founder of his home world, Sky's Edge, who is both revered and reviled for the crimes he committed for his people. Most of the book is set in the titular Chasm City, an amazing place where buildings and machinery are infected with a plague that infect nanomachines and mutate them into weird nightmarishly shaped things. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Although it is sometimes labelled as Revelation Space book 2, they reckoned this was the best book and has the advantage of being readable as a standalone story. The plot doesn’t follow a straight line or even some kind of zig-zag path towards finding Reivich; it seems more like a kind of drunken, slightly off-kilter spiral towards the final confrontation.In Chasm City Reynolds seems to be paying homage to cheesy who-dun-its, plot-twisty detective novels and overwrought crime thrillers.

From 1991 until 2007, he lived in The Netherlands, where he was employed by The European Space Agency as an astrophysicist.

A character recovering from amnesia certainly is a tried and true method of revealing someone's past, but Reynolds manages to make the amnesia fit into the story in a logical way; the amnesia doesn't come across as a contrived excuse. The other main character, Tanner Mirabel, is a former soldier who lives in Sky's Edge hundreds of years after Haussmann was executed.

He's also very good at helping the reader visualise all the strange worlds in glorious detail - at times I could "see" it as if I was watching a film.In this respect Chasm City doesn't seem to take itself too seriously, an important element of getting the reader to accept what Reynolds is doing.