“Revelation Space is a mix of hard science fiction, epic space opera, and an old-fashioned gothic novel like Wuthering Heights.
Although this is a thick book, there are really only two plot lines which converge about midway through the book. One involves a scientist who is trying to solve the archaeological riddle of an outlying alien civilization which was destroyed. The other story line follows the journey of an enormous spooky spaceship with only a few crew members who are looking for a way to heal their captain, an ancient man whose cybernetic devices have been corrupted by some kind of nanotechnology plague (as has much of the ship's technology). I enjoyed the sequences on the ship the most, they are wonderfully atmospheric.
Reynolds draws more interesting characters than most hard science fiction writers do, but I kept wishing he wasn't quite so slow to reveal their motivations. To build suspense, he holds back on revealing their motivations and their loyalties to each other, but after a while, this makes them all seem a little too vague. I'm not sure the question of why they act the way they do is ever adequately resolved.
The prose style is quite dense and this is a very slow read. I'm still processing the ending, but to me it was confusing. This is Reynolds' first book, and I will eventually try others because his ideas are interesting and his style is promising, but I hope that in later books, he finds a way to make his narrative more compact. It's a very visual work that might actually make a better film than a novel.”
