Revelation Space Trilogy

Revelation Space Trilogy (Revelation Space, Chasm City, Absolution Gap), Alastair Reynolds, Ace Books

Set several hundred years from now, the first book, Revelation Space, is about an archaeologist named Dan Silvestre. He is convinced that the destruction of a spacefaring race called the Amarantin on a backwater planet called Resurgam a millennia ago should be of utmost importance to humanity. It has to do with the reason that mankind, as of yet, has found a lot fewer live spacefaring civilizations, and therefore, more dead civilizations, than predicted by the mathematical models. It also involves an artificial planet orbiting a neutron star, which really isn't a neutron star, in Resurgam's solar system.

The second book, Chasm City, is about Tanner Mirabel, an ex-soldier who is chasing a man named Argent Reivich for a bit of promised revenge. Chasm City is a domed city built around a gas-spewing chasm on an otherwise inhospitable planet. Several years previously, the city was hit by the Melding Plague. Affecting nanomachines, which are everywhere (in buildings and people), it caused them to react and change in all sorts of strange and unpredictable ways. At random moments, Mirabel has very detailed visions, due to a designer virus, about a man named Sky Haussmann, an important part of a mission to colonize that system several hundred years previously. Depending on who one believes, Haussmann deserved the religion that has grown up around him since then, or he deserved his death by crucifixion.

Absolution Gap, the third book, is about the Inhibitors, self-replicating machinery whose purpose is to destroy all civilizations reaching a certain level of sentience. The Inhibitors have come to a backwater planet called Ararat, where a man named Clavain, and a genetically modified pig named Scorpio have led a ragtag group of refugees. Also, on an ice-covered moon called Hela, a man has created an entire religion, including mobile cathedrals, around the tendency of its gas-giant parent planet (which isn't really a planet), to occasionally disappear.

Separately, these books are excellent. Collectively, they constitute a wonderful piece of writing. Not only is this series full of first-rate storytelling and character development, there is also plenty of mind-blowing space opera. It is hard to believe that Revelation Space, the first of this trilogy, is the author's first published novel, it's that good. This is very much worth reading.