I Read Books: Chasm City

 

Chasm City

Reynolds returns to his Revelation Space universe as we follow Tanner Mirabel, a security expert from Sky’s Edge who travels to the Yellowstone system on a quest for revenge. Frozen during the long starflight he wakes with amnesia and strange visions. Yellowstone itself has changed; previously the centre of the belle epoque, a golden age of humanity, the melding plague has forced people to give up much of their high technology.

Chasm City is now a steampunk noir hellscape, with the privileged up in the Canopy of the domed city amongst the twisted remnants of the mutated buildings, while down below is the Mulch*, an always raining undercity with black market neurosurgeons, rickshaws and hyperpigs. Tanner makes his way from top to bottom and back, encountering the ice mendicants, a religious order who help space travellers when they are unfrozen, the hunt, who, um, hunt people, daredevil chasm jumpers, drug dealers, the secret history of Chasm City and also the secret history of Sky’s Edge.

There’s a lot going on here is what I’m trying to say. An interstellar revenge spree (or two), two timelines, two sets of memories, the settling of Sky’s Edge and a secret that also reaches down into Chasm City, linking it to the secret history revealed in Revelation Space. Maybe too much? I seem to recall expecting something more focussed than Revelation Space, a science fiction detective story and instead it sprawled even more as space opera.

Read This: For a cool science fiction novel spread across time, space, planets, delving deep into the history of the setting and several personal tales of revenge
Don’t Read This: If this sounds too complicated

* An urban jungle, get it.