After having read Revelation Space I immediately started looking for further books from the same author. Turns out, I misspelled his name while searching Amazon.de, which just turned up the one book I had already read.
So, I’ve now been reading Alastair’s next book, Chasm City, which is just as good. It is set in the same universe (and Reynolds cleverly hands out a bit of fan-service for the people who remember his previous novel) and details a character’s road to revenge. Simple in theory, beautifully complex in practice and again raising plenty of interesting questions and concepts along the way.
With this novel, I have to revise my opinion of Reynolds, and I am now officially looking as much forward to his future books as I am excited about Vernor Vinge’s work!
thoughts…
— forever in migration —
ah great to find another sci-fi lover. i see you’ve read hyperion saga too. =) currently, i’m waiting for that second part of simmons’ newest (conclusion to Ilium). if you havent already, try out the Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. It’s really six books (2,2,2). and you might like cyberpunk genre too? check out william gibson, he’s a good author; well his earlier works are stunning… neuromancer, etc. the latest seemed really sub par.
I’ve read blurbs of Illium, and I am not sure I like it (knowing next to nothing about Homer’s Epos). But then I should have been put off by the Keats-accociation in Hyperion / Endymion as well, which I wasn’t.
Peter F. Hamilton has been mentioned to me before and will be checked out on that basis.
Of course I’ve read Gibson, but I agree with you that I more enjoyed his older books than his recent output…
Thanks for the recommendations, but could you elaborate a bit on Illium, which I am still unsure about?
hey man. sorry for the late reply. i’ve been working 13 hour days for the last week. anyway, the basis for ilium is Homer’s tale. you really only need to sort of know the gist of the story (perhaps you saw the movie Troy?) — mainly the greeks attacking troy because Helen was stolen yadda yadda etc. the twist is that the location is mars. and the people involved in the story are some sort of species. (i dont quite recall if they were human (terran) or martian, but that’s really not the main point.) anyway these people act out Homer’s tale. the catch is that none of these “actors” knows the play (so they dont know what they should do or how it will end) and they can only play their assigned roles. now there are a few people that DO know the story and these are historians (or something like that) that got “warped” to mars. their role is to ensure that the play goes according to script. of course, one of these historians decides to change the script…