Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Reviews
 

Reynolds has created an amazing universe in these books. I love so much of it; the Conjoiners, the Demarchists, Chasm City, the Jugglers, the Melding Plague, and so on. As far as the 'hard' science is concerned, I could not tell you if any of it makes sense or is total rubbish, but I like it: Tau neutrinos and Brane Space? Sure, bring it on.

He is also a master in creating characters that you have a great deal of empathy for, and there are plenty in this series: Sylveste, Clavain, Skade, Felka, Volyova, Khouri, the Captain, Scorpio, Bax and Remontaire.
Now this is where I fall out with Mr Reynolds, because he has a habit of just throwing said characters away in a sentence.
To quote (names omitted): She thinks of x,y,z and all the others...none of them could have survived the phase of bombardment when the pieces of the ruined moon began to hit the ocean."
Well thanks very much for that death of a main character in such a pointless fashion, but it's not the only one, and it happens far too often. I also thought the Clavain/Skade incident in Absolution Gap was completely unneccessary; that's right - completely and absolutely unneccessary.
If he had treated his characters a bit better, this would have got a higher rating from me. Kill off main characters at your peril.

Overall marks for the trilogy:
Revelation Space universe 5/5
Characters 4/5
Treatment of characters 1/5
Storyline 4/5

Wisiwig

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I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed the previous two Alastair Reynolds' books in this series and was looking forward greatly to reading this one.

This is a slightly more complex book than the previous two with several separate stories that eventually join together. One of these threads in particular kept me guessing at how it fitted in with the overall story right up until the moment the author revealed it. Well done Mr Reynolds!

It goes without saying that the set piece space battles and the technology were very well envisioned. Characterisation was also really rather good for an action oriented sci-fi novel.

However, with less than 100 pages to go, I really was beginning to wonder how the author was going to get himself out of the corner into which he had painted himself.

I was prepared to be impressed, but unfortunately that was not to be the case.

In total the three core books in this series, Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap total around 1900 pages.

I enjoyed almost all of those pages but really feel the books and the readers that read them deserved a better ending.

Deus Ex Machina.... Arghhhhhhh!!!!

I almost yelled at the book in frustration! Surely that can't be it?! - But it was.

I will certainly read more of Alastair Reynolds' work, but I will be prepared for disappointing endings now.

S. Horrigan

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Reynolds was recommended by a friend whose judgement I usually trust. Absolution Gap is the third of R's novels I've read, and I could barely finish it. By the end, I was skimming whole pages just to get to the distinctly underwhelming conclusion. It is not just that the plot is incoherent, and that none of the premises / promises made in the first half are satisfactorily resolved. It is worse than that - the writing is unbearably inadequate for a long-haul of this kind. Repetitive phrase follows repetitive phrase. Machinery is described at inordinate length - OK, this is supposed to be "hard" SF but still you don't need to spend a page telling us how an airlock door works every single time someone enters or exits a space-craft. He has a tin ear - so identical turns of phrase are repeated far too close together ("devoid" turns up twice in the same para; the coinage "not excellent" instead of "not good" is used twice a few lines apart). A typical over-wordy locution goes something like: "A lot of people had been killed, still, there could have been more casualities, if there had been more people there, although the injured were taken to hospital, but still many people died" - on and on in this vein. Certain favoured aspects of back-story - that there had been a golden age - that pigs don't live as long as humans - are told and retold over and over again - until you want to scream, yes we know, we know. Other essential aspects are thoroughly road-signed - R's research on the Scuttlers, the possibility that the Jugglers might be a match for the Inhibitors - but then either totally dropped or filled in perfunctorally in the dreadful final chapters. Why bring on a new alien threat at that late date? what about the two alien threats we've spent most of the book learning (not) to care about? Then there are issues of personality and motivation. If Conjoiners are supposed to be creatures above emotion, why the hell does Skade - ultra-super Conjoiner - insist on taking a sadistic revenge? Conjoiners are not supposed to care about revenge - or sadism for that matter. Is she insane? What happened to the Night Council? Why spend all that time building up Vasko and then do nothing at with him? What became of Grelier's cunning plan to hook R up with a religious maniac in order to get her to the cathedral? Maybe he realised this plan could take another fourteen interminable chapters, so he changed his mind & went directly to yank her off the caravan. Why did Grelier visit R's adopted parents? We're never told. Aura is supposed to be prophetically infallible, yet the handful of times we see her giving any practical advice, she's wrong in each case. Why should the Captain care about Aura? He's never cared about anyone else - it took massive efforts to get him to assist - or at least not block - efforts to save humanity itself in the earlier book. How does Scorpio know the Shadows are evil? Are they in fact evil? Evidence? What happened to Sunstealer and the birdpeople? I could go on - but for further details see some of the other reviews. Reynolds really really needs a good editor. Cut by about two-thirds, with all the infelicitous English ironed out, and a basic plot focus, this could have been an interesting novel.
atalanta

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Reynolds has a great style of writing but he is poor when it comes to writing a plot.

Maarten

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So, Revelation Space was the first book that I saw advertised in the Cinema, and proved to be as awesome as the ad suggested, right up at the top of my all time best reads, sci-fi or otherwise. Follow up with Chasm City was pretty good, but problem is with big concept stuff is that it's hard to tie off those loose ends and bring an all-encompassing ending together. Although I like the dystopic view of the future where even your thoughts may not be your own, AR has fallen well short of expectations with Absolution Gap. Got bored of a few characters that he'd spent ages building up and killed them off in unnecessarily brief or easy ways, and ended the whole series in a particularly loose and fuzzy way. Recent offerings from AR have also lacked the depth of RevSpace - please get a new editor, and lets get back to deep storylines, glossy, believable characters and high concept sci-fi...
The Engineer

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