With Revelation Space and Redemption Ark, Alastair Reynolds redefined the hard sci-fi space opera. Adopting a scale of truly mind-boggling proportions, this tale of humanity’s desperate fight for survival against the Inhibitors, a foe of such power and potence as to be almost beyond comprehension, these two novels set the stage for the mother of all plot resolutions. Can the final volume in the series, Absolution Gap, live up to the expectations raised by its predecessors? Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes all you want to do is kick back and read something a little less intellectually challenging than Joyce or Trollope. If it involves high-tech cyborg soldiers and enormous alien monsters, all the better. It was in that frame of mind that I rather wisely picked up Neal Asher’s The Line of Polity.

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Alastair Reynolds thinks big. Really big. In Redemption Ark, the sequel to his brilliant debut novel Revelation Space, nothing less than the survival of humankind is at stake. The genius of Reynolds is his ability to paint his picture on such a grand canvas and still make the story comprehensible to the average, cosmologically-challenged reader. Read the rest of this entry »