I Read Books: The Prefect

The Prefect

Alistair Reynolds takes us to the heart of the belle epoque of his Revelation Space universe, the Glitter Band, ten thousand habitats in orbit around the planet Yellowstone. It’s the freest, most advanced and most diverse human civilisation in history!

It’s a snakepit of plotting and intrigue, kept mostly under control by the Prefects, the police force. Tom Dreyfus discovers someone has been using loopholes in the voting software and acts decisively to shut it down. This sets in motion, and also reveals/unravels, a plot to save/change/destroy the Glitter Band. Tensions rise between the Band and the Ultras, the weird cyborgs who crew starships. Clues lead to the Clockmaker, an AI that killed Dreyfus’s wife and forced a strange scarab onto the neck of his boss, so she is left untouchable and sleepless in a zero gravity room. Dreyfus finds that his own memories are unreliable, and maybe also his fellow prefects.

I would say this is an efficient thriller, but in fact it is startlingly inefficient, with baroque settings, plot points from several other stories in the universe and storylines meshing with others like clockwork. And that's a good thing.

Read This: An exciting science fiction thriller
Don’t Read This: If visiting weird space habitats only for them to be [SPOILERS] as part of a larger plot is not for you