The hibernation causes partial amnesia, so once Tanner awakens, he needs rehab before he sets off to bag his quarry. One of the main characters contracts this virus, which implants the memories of a revered historical figure, thereby revealing key historical facts.

Although it is sometimes labelled as Revelation Space book 2, they reckoned this was the best book and has the advantage of being readable as a standalone story. For in Chasm City, Reynolds has given us a dripping wet, sticky, seedy, smelly shithole of a place to set a story … a city covered in a layer of literal and figurative slime … a city which has no laws except the law of the strong and the weak, the law of the very rich and the very poor… a city inhabited by buildings that have reshaped themselves according to their own arcane will … and the buildings inhabited by people that scrape the bottom of the barrel of human experience and are grateful for the handful of filth they find. The structure of the book is almost linear but not quite, as two different stands of flashback sequences are also woven into the main story arc. Chasm City has many of the same issues as Revelation Space – paper-thin characters and overly expository dialogue chief among them – but it’s still a pretty enjoyable dark sci-fi adventure, and I’m looking forward to getting back into the story of the main trilogy with Redemption Ark.

Cahuella learns that Reivich means to kill him, so the arms dealer and his security chief go on alert and prepare for the attack. There are links that tie the two narratives together, with more hints at the underlying mythology of the Revelation Space universe.

Him being driven by revenge against a certain Argent Reivich, the book is actually an account of his travels from his planet Sky's Edge to Chasm City, accompanied by lots of fighting, shooting, chasing, saving and double-crossing; chapter by chapter discovering the motifs behind his own actions, layers of memories (true and fake) to be peeled off before he finally realizes who he was.Like the melding plague, it has grown a life of its own in my memory to insinuate an extra star in this review. He gets thrust into a “Most Dangerous Game” hunt (as the quarry), then he gets rescued, betrays his rescuer, goes on a fact-finding mission, hooks up with his rescuer again, etc.

Along with his own memories, Tanner begins having intense, realistic dreams that remember parts of the life of Sky Haussmann, the vilified founder of Sky’s Edge. One of those books that I massively enjoy having read, past tense, but ultimately didn’t enjoy while reading. there’s hints scattered throughout the various storylines, and the ending is pretty much all the threads of a tapestry suddenly converging to show you the full, mind boggling picture.which brings me to my next point: to say that there are no complex, competent women in this story would be doing a disservice to all the male characters who also lack all complexity, but this story does employ a few utterly annoying sexist tropes. As the ships’ societies gradually begin to drift apart and they develop into a sort of cold war, Sky realises that old ghost stories about a mysterious sixth ship trailing the fleet are actually true – a dark and silent vessel has been shadowing them for generations. the prose is unimaginative, the plot is drab and slow, and the dialogue feels like it was written by someone with only a vague concept of how people communicate. Cool ideas here include an in-depth consideration of a generation ship-type mission, a different take on cybernetic implants, musings on the psychological impact of virtual immortality and a richly imagined post-plague dystopia. but Chasm City’s best aspect is simply the general atmosphere of this husk of a city, its golden age come to an abrupt end, an awful alien place of sulphur and dirt and gross inequality.

Tanner Mirabel was a security specialist who never made a mistake – until the day a woman in his care was blown away by Argent Reivich, a vengeful young postmortal. I'm a big fan of Ian M Banks' culture novels because, like all good "Space Opera", they focus on the development of one or two characters at a time in some galaxy-spanning universe that is never about the universe as much as it is about the characters - the "space" is just a backdrop for a really good story. Tanner Mirabel was a security specialist who never made a mistake - until the day a woman in his care was blown away by Argent Reivich, a vengeful young postmortal. We have found that attempts to gloss over or understate the truth of what happened – of what continues to happen – are ultimately harmful; that the best approach – based on a statistical study of cases such as yours – is to present the facts in as open and honest manner as possible.I met my wife in the Netherlands through a mutual interest in climbing and we married back in Wales. Tanner Mirabel was a security specialist who never made a mistake ¿ until the day a woman in his care was blown away by Argent Reivich, a vengeful young postmortal.