Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

Product Information

So, yeah, Chasm City, which various blogs convinced me was a great place to start with the author, is full of ambitious sci-fi storytelling, some of it familiar, some of it fresh and fascinating, all of it fairly well "explained" with convincing-sounding science-y justifications, or at least as convincing as you can get when you are talking about nano-machine plagues that reshape and mutate entire space colonies. Somewhat different from Revelation Space—and that’s probably a good thing— Chasm City delivers an interesting mix of mystery, thriller, and philosophy. but the eventual thematic message ended up lacking an impact for me; it felt hollow thanks to inconsistencies and/or lack of depth in character progression and growth. The main elements that distinguish Chasm City from many other space opera and cyberpunk offerings is its unique “gothic cyberpunk” feel.

Cahuella learns that Reivich means to kill him, so the arms dealer and his security chief go on alert and prepare for the attack. The use of low-tech also resembles the post-fossil fuel future society of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Most importantly for sf, he is extremely good at world building, creating astounding yet believable and vivid places and life forms, if you are looking for escapism he is your man. Perhaps one of the reasons I enjoyed Sky’s narrative so much was the relative straightforwardness of the plot compared to the digressions that dominate Tanner’s.There are three main stories, set in different times and places and it swaps between them without ever being confusing.

It’s definitely worth untangling again in a future reading, and I’m so glad that Chasm City showed me what has appealed to his large fan base, since I was not convinced by the REVELATION SPACE trilogy.

The main trilogy (Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap) featured a lot of good hard SF world-building, but was heavily weighed down by clunky characters, dialogue, and extremely bloated page-count.