As I said back in my review for Hyperion, I have a soft spot
for space opera. There’s something about vistas on different worlds, big
lumbering spaceships, and people running around with blasters or ray-guns that
lowers my reader defenses. I’ve readily admitted that I’m unduly hard on high
fantasy; well, it’s the opposite for me and space opera. I’m not trying to jump
into the “fantasy sucks” arguments that flare up now and then from sf fandom; it’s purely a
personal preference thing. The ‘80s were a second golden age for the sub-genre,
with several post-Star Wars winners culminating in the inspiring originality of
Hyperion. Things fell off a bit in the ‘90s, but Vinge and Bujold kept things
going. Since then, though…well, A Deepness in the Sky was the last space opera to win the Hugo, and even digging
into the other awards, this will be one of the last space opera novels I cover.
That said, Reynolds is representative of a group of authors, mostly British,
carrying the genre forward in the twenty-first century.
This is my first Reynolds novel, so I can’t say a whole lot
about the Revelation Space setting in which it, and the majority of his work,
takes place. Humans have spread to other planets, they’ve run into signs of
other intelligences, but not many living representatives, nano-machines and all
sorts of transhuman augmentation exists, but faster-than-light travel doesn’t
seem to. It seems that the mood is what most sets Reynolds apart though. Space
isn’t a pleasant place, and human beings aren’t particularly pleasant either.
Betrayal, violence, war, and societal collapse seem to overshadow humanity
among the stars.
That’s certainly true of the two settings in Chasm City. It
starts with Tanner Mirabel on the war-torn planet of Journey’s End. He’s a
mercenary/veteran who’s involved in some old grudges that lead him to survive a
massive, space-elevator-destroying attack in an early action set-piece. Tanner
then awakes with partial amnesia near the thriving planet of Yellowstone, still
pursuing the old grudge. Tanner thought Yellowstone was thriving, but
a machine-infecting virus has laid the planet low. The virus causes machines to
go crazy, and it’s killed many people, interfered with the life-extending
treatments of many more, destroyed an orbital district around Yellowstone, and
turned the capital of Chasm City into an anarchic, dystopian disaster. This
doesn’t put Tanner off of his plans to execute his old enemy though, and he
continues to Chasm City and gets himself into all sorts of tricky situations,
including a most dangerous “Game,” some high-risk surgery, long falls from
damaged cable cars, and lots and lots of firefights.
All the while, Tanner has flashbacks to the life of the
venerated founder of his faction from Journey’s End, named Sky Hausmann. As
these memories pop up through the book, we learn about the planet’s
colonization, the origins of its conflicts, the results of mistakes while
working with anti-matter fuel, a few facts about alien life, and the truth
about Sky Hausmann.
I really wanted to like this rare, award-winning space opera
of the last decade, and I thought I very much would early in the book. Reynolds
does some pretty solid world-building, quickly establishing his dark take on
humanity in space and painting the ruined Chasm City itself with rich, moody
details. The novel did lose me at some point in the second half though. It’s a
little too long, and a little too obsessed with dramatic twists over solid
storytelling. There are just so many odd turns in the end, and some rely on big
contrivances (without spoiling things too much: Tanner runs into a galactic
rarity TWICE in two very different places). I stopped caring the third time
someone was NOT WHO WE THOUGHT THERE WERE, and there were two or three such BIG
REVELATIONS left (is this why it’s called “revelation” space?). Reynolds’ love
of the grim and gritty didn’t help either - almost all of the surprises reveal
that characters are actually terrible. I don’t mind a little darkness; I just
got bored with its relentlessness here. The biggest twists have to do with Tanner’s lost memories
(you know when a character acquires amnesia that there are some surprises on
the way), but I wasn’t particularly interested in them. I wasn’t involved in
Tanner, and I didn’t care about his true story.
There’s some solid world-building and fun action here, but I
was not impressed overall. More varied character work, less misdirection, and
more streamlined storytelling might have kept me in Reynolds’ world a little
longer. Also, as with A Deepness in the Sky, I don’t think an sf novice would
stand a chance here, and that, in my opinion, goes a long way towards explaining space opera's fade.
Grade: B-
