The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Here, the author takes us back to the universe he has explored in most of his writing career, starting in Revelation Space and continuing through to Absolution Gap, plus a collection, Galactic North. The Prefect takes place earlier than any of the other novels, and is set in the Glitter Band, a collection of over one hundred thousand habitats orbiting in the same system as the planet Yellowstone. It's a near Golden Age for the Glitter Band, but something is amiss and all life may be in jeopardy.

Zima Blue and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Hard science fiction, and space opera, are styles of SF that tend to work better at lengths longer than short stories. The depth of historical background, and the ideas needed to sustain a story that ranges far in space and time often requires a fairly large number of words. In order to make it work at a shorter length, hard SF writers tend to focus in on a single idea. The story becomes an exploration of that idea, sometimes at the expense of character and style.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rich Horton
It opens with a curious prologue set 18,000 years in the future, describing an ambitious plan to celebrate the legendary Benefactor who started humanity on the road toward expansion into the Galaxy. Then we get a flashback to 2057, and the story of this Benefactor, a woman named Bella Lind. Bella is the captain of an ice mining spaceship, the Rockhopper. This ship is suddenly diverted to chase a moon of Saturn, Janus, which has suddenly accelerated and headed out of the Solar System: clearly, it's an alien artifact of some sort. Bella, however, must convince her crew to go along: it's a highly dangerous mission, and their corporate bosses do not inspire confidence.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by David Soyka
A crew of commercial "space divers" recovers water-rich ice comets that are "pushed back" to the inner worlds for mining. On one of their trips, Janus, a moon of Saturn, is moving out of orbit and behaving like an alien spacecraft. Their company mining ship Rockhopper is the only vessel close enough to intercept for an intelligence mission. Trouble is, the company owner isn't telling all it knows about Rockhopper's ability to return home.

Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rich Horton
The story begins on two threads. One concerns Wendell Floyd, an American in Paris in 1959. But his Paris is rather altered: its technology lags our own 1959 just a bit, apparently because World War II never happened. Floyd is a sometime jazz musician who mainly works as a private detective, and he is drawn into investigating the mysterious death of an American woman. Meanwhile, three centuries in the future, Verity Auger, an expert on Paris in the 21st Century, is maneuvered into accepting a strange assignment: wormhole travel back to Paris in 1959. It seems an agent has just been murdered, and Verity must try to recover some valuable information she had gathered.

Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Martin Lewis
When the novel begins, we are in Paris. What's more it is the 50s. Wendell Floyd is an ex-pat American who came to France to become a jazz musician. Instead he became a private detective, although he and his partner, Andre Custin, still play in order to make ends meet. A pragmatist and political animal rather than tough guy gumshoe Floyd finds the answer to his money woes in an apparent suicide. When a young American woman, Susan White, is found dead outside her apartment her landlord does not accept the view of the police that she jumped and hires the pair to investigate. Suddenly, the next chapter takes us somewhere else entirely. Or perhaps not. We are still in Paris but in a very different Paris; an ice-locked city haunted by the furies of a 23rd Century Nanocaust. Paris, and the whole of the Earth, is abandoned and dead.

Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by David Soyka
Set in the same far-future setting of his grand space opera novels, this novella portrays sibling rivalry and reconciliation in the context of planetary invasion and destruction. Sisters Naqi and Mini Okpik are researchers on the largely aquatic world of Turquoise, studying a life form that coats the oceans in an algae-like way. (A song lyric by Echo and the Bunnymen apparently inspired the setting.) The life form is a Pattern Juggler, which inhabits other worlds (and figures a bit in the author's other novels).

Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by David Soyka
When last we saw our intrepid heroes, the search for the cause of the extinction of the ancient race of the Amarantin had somehow or another transformed archeologist Dan Sylveste and his wife Pascale into some sort of stellar consciousness. Meanwhile, his two unwilling accomplices are dealing with their own plights -- the hired assassin Khouri seeks to return to "normal" existence while purported war criminal and weapons expert Ilia Volyova is warming up her ship's preserved Captain, whose consciousness is merging with onboard AI systems...

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by David Soyka
The typical space opera conventions are here -- interstellar travel among human colonized worlds, a menace to the universe, a hero on a quest, sardonic dialogue, one dimensional characters -- but they're dressed up with hard SF speculations about the nature of the universe without violating known astrophysical laws, combined with the tropes of seemingly sentient artificial constructs and biomechanical prosthetic enhancements that blur the distinction between human and machine. All of which serves to take the much, and perhaps deservedly, denigrated term of "space opera" to another level.

Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rodger Turner
The Childe family has spent 250 years in deep space exploration looking for signs of alien life or remnants of their civilization. In a far off corner, on a planet called Golgotha, a ship making repairs has found a building shaped like a cathedral spire with a bulb seemingly spiked on the top. Its purpose and its contents remain a mystery, for the spire's defenses repel with deadly force all those who enter -- unless they can solve the puzzles which control access to its rooms. Childe has brought together a group to crack the mystery of an alien artifact on this faraway planet.

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Rich Horton
Set in the same future as his first novel, Revelation Space, the book follows Tanner Mirabel who comes to Yellowstone from Sky's Edge (a planet of 61 Cygni A in the Delta Pavonis star system). He is looking to kill Argent Reivich, who had killed the woman he loved. While tracking him down, we learn about Reivich's attempt on an arms dealer's life (in revenge for supplying the weapons that killed Reivich's family) and Tanner's infection with an "indoctrination virus," which implants memories of Sky Haussmann, the sometimes revered, sometimes hated, last Captain of the first ship to reach Sky's Edge.

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
The novel centres on Dan Sylveste, an archeologist studying the remains of an extinct, bird-like alien race. His past is tied to the crew of the Infinity, who need information stored in Sylveste's head. Events lead to a large, heavily defended artifact orbiting around a neutron star, which seems to hold all the answers. Along the way there are kidnappings, political revolutions, betrayals, and intrigue.