Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

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There are links that tie the two narratives together, with more hints at the underlying mythology of the Revelation Space universe.

Into this background comes our main protagonist Tanner Mirabel, a mercenary hunting his employer's killers from the giant serpent infested Jungles of Sky's Edge to the plague infested Canopy of Chasm City to the very maw of hell itself.This book is a very intricately plotted sf novel with strong element of a noir thriller, but the emphasis is definitely on the sci-fi. On the downside, and this is a complaint I have with all of his books, the characters are not entirely believable and I'm never fully convinced of their motivations. I started off publishing short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone in the early 90s, then eventually branched into novels.

I first read Revelation Space nearly eight years ago and didn’t much care for it; it had some promising aspects but was weighed down by stilted dialogue, shallow characters and a bloated prose style. However, I 'd still take one star down for a too false Hollywood-ish trick the author produces in the very last chapter to deal with Tanner and his likely antagonist.The chase requires quite a bit of interstellar travel, part of which is even on a space elevator which brings to mind Arthur C. The first follows a security operative, Tanner Mirabel, as he hunts a fugitive through what was once humanity’s greatest and most advanced civilisation, now reduced to a tangled, twisted slum by a disease that preys on nanotechnology.

As every other review notes, this book is part of the Revelation Space universe but stands alone; one does not need to read any of the other novels to enjoy it. which is a little weird in a society where people can apparently easily swap body parts and/or flip gender identities. Much of the story is an epic chase in which Tanner gets into one dangerous situation after another as he tries to find and kill Reivich. There are quite a few scientists who are writing sf but (IMO) Reynolds is the best story teller and prose stylist among them.In Chasm City Reynolds seems to be paying homage to cheesy who-dun-its, plot-twisty detective novels and overwrought crime thrillers. By contrast, the relatively few wealthy people in Chasm City - who've had their 'mechanics' removed - live in elevated homes in the canopy. Chasm City is a 2001 novel by author Alastair Reynolds, set in the Revelation Space universe and standalone within the Revelation space series. Gone are the simple plots and tropes of your typical TV sci-fi, there is crazyness and creativity at every turn within these pages.