After several books which suggested a decline in Reynolds' power, he comes back with perhaps his most imaginative books.

These action sequences are spectacular, and the sense that more will happen adds to the pressure which builds as the book progresses. Panoply is a small, efficient police force, dedicated to maintaining the rule of democracy among the ten thousand disparate city-states orbiting the planet Yellowstone. In my spare time I am a very keen runner, and I also enjoying hill-walking, birdwatching, horse-riding, guitar and model-making. Tom D refuse is a high-ranking prefect, a sort of policeman whose job it is to enforce the accords between the inhabitants of the glitter. Still, once things started popping a little over halfway through the book, I found myself racing through it.A fitting end to the Dreyfus trilogy, and maybe the closest we get to a happy ending for a Reynolds book? A mix of hard science with space opera, big ideas, and again characters that readers want to know more about.

It's something he's been knocked for, especially in his early novels, but he's clearly grown to become an author fully capable of creating authentic characters with genuine emotional resonance. In the end, all the desperate elements come together but nicely in a plot worthy of a murder mystery. Machine Vendetta begins with Prefect Ingvar Tench taking an unscheduled journey to Transtromer, a minor habitat where she is killed by a mob. I thank Alastair Reynolds and Orbit Books for kindly providing a temporary electronic review copy of this work. Some of my books and stories are set in a consistent future named after Revelation Space, the first novel, but I've done a lot of other things as well and I like to keep things fresh between books.

I started off publishing short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone in the early 90s, then eventually branched into novels. This is a book where previous actions have consequences and important and difficult decisions have to be made as a result, some of which are lifechanging. Four years ago, when an investigation linked to one of his most dangerous adversaries got a little too personal, Dreyfus arranged for Tench to continue the inquiry by proxy.

It's fun to see more stories set in the Glitter Band and also to be reminded why the Revelation Space Universe is the worst place ever to live. In any event, don't start here, start with the first book, originally titled 'The Prefect' then reissued as 'Aurora Rising'. This novel's ideas are mind-stretching, including a limbo where copies of the dead can be kept and interrogated, and a chillingly mischievous AI that tempts and mocks Dreyfus. I wanted to know how the story would play out, and it was interesting, but didn't rush me through with anticipation.I confess that I did not find this episode as compelling as the others, partly because I could get the mystery pretty early, it's telegraphed pretty easily for anyone paying attention. Tench had no intention of arriving at this habitat, but her navigation and communication systems have been surreptitiously taken over, redirecting her from her original target to this violent and dangerous place. But 'cop' is not the correct term – it's more like they are the public safety monitors, trying to deal with any issues with a light touch but willing to bring in the heavy support as needed. I did find however that reading about the familiar characters and setting made it not as impactful as say, his recent book Eversion. Reynolds achieves a masterful blend of mystery/police procedural, hard sci-fi, intrigue and action, all within the fascinating far future world of a distributed and loosely federated human civilization often barely recognizable as such due to radical genetic and/or cybernetic engineering.

About halfway through the book, the storyline takes a sharp turn and concentrates on the interaction between Creature and the demigod Aurora.The relentless narrative momentum it employs simply underscores the pertinent urgency of that topic. It wasn’t a great resolution, not even as good as the rest of the book, but acceptable all things considered.