inhibitor phase a revelation space novel alastair reynolds

Glass and her miraculously potent stealth starship take de Ruyter on a multi-stage mission in search of a weapon that can hold off the wolves, and along the way his old self slowly starts to reassert itself. Nor is that starship survivor, Glass, the ordinary human woman that she seems to be, and her nature and powers are only partly revealed by the end of the novella-length Part One that sets up the rest of the tale. Intermittent flashbacks reveal not only de Ruyter’s identity but a history of complex intrahuman warfare, of personal and political betrayals, and of adventures only glancingly addressed in this novel. But the apparent refugee starship is a ruse, and its sole survivor has actually come looking for de Ruyter, who is neither who or what he believes himself to be. And hiding out means destroying other fugitive starships that might draw the attention of the wolves to the heavily camouflaged Sun Hollow. The main action of Inhibitor Space unwinds gradually and rather indirectly, starting with the narrator, Miguel de Ruyter, on a mission to destroy a starship that threatens to reveal the presence of Sun Hollow, an extrasolar sanctuary where a small group of humans are hiding from the “wolves” – also known as the inhibitors, swarms of ancient machines dedicated to wiping out technological civilizations wherever they arise. This scope allows for the inclusion of all manner of items from the Big Box of Tropes: Stapledonian timescapes with plenty of rise-and-fall cycles present action haunted by events from deep time the proliferation of post-human species and societies: implacable non- or post-sentient forces bent on destroying technological civilizations. Inhibitor Space is the fourth in the sequence that includes Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, and Absolution Gap – a group that can be seen as the core of this future history, since it outlines the struggles of humankind in a vast and deep galactic conflict that eventually takes us out of the Milky Way altogether. Banks’s Culture, or Neal Asher’s Polity), it can dump the reader anywhere and anywhen for a story that may or may not require familiarity with what has gone before or will come after. And like other sprawling, nonlinear series settings (think Larry Niven’s Known Space, Ian M. ( Orbit 978-0316462761, $16.99, 432pp, tp) October 2021.Īlastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe looks forward nearly 40,000 years (and backward a billion) and encompasses several distinct sub-series whose stories occasionally cross each other.

Inhibitor phase a revelation space novel alastair reynolds