I Read Books: Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Two novellas in the Revelation Space universe, possibly linked. In Diamond Dogs Richard is recruited by Rolande Childe to travel to the planet Golgotha and enter a deadly puzzle maze in a spire. They’re part of a motley team that includes Celestine, Richard’s ex-wife who he has erased his memories of and has been gifted mathematical skills by the Pattern Jugglers, and Dr Trintignant, a cyberneticist whose experiments on humans go beyond what even the machine-adapted inhabitants of Chasm City find acceptable.

To solve the puzzles they have to adapt themselves beyond all recognition.

In Turquoise Days the planet Turquoise is a world sea filled with Pattern Jugglers. This causes everything to rot, and combined with isolation makes for an interesting society and culture (and technology) that we see very little of. A ship arrives, claiming to want to try out theories about the Pattern Jugglers but they have an ulterior motive; what the Jugglers absorb into their structure is preserved and there are secrets to be found out and kept.

A pair of dark stories about the strangeness out on the fringes of the Revelation Space Universe (and also at the heart).

Read This: Some cool science fiction with spooky questions about the limits of humanity
Don’t Read This: You didn’t care about the mainline novels, the sidestories are even less interesting