Rhetoric and Logic

The main action of Inhibitor Space unwinds gradually and rather indirectly, starting with the narrator, Miguel de Ruyter, on a mission to destroy a starship that threatens to reveal the presence of Sun Hollow, an extrasolar sanctuary where a small group of humans are hiding from the “wolves” – also known as the inhibitors, swarms of ancient machines dedicated to wiping out technological civilizations wherever they arise. And hiding out means destroying other fugitive starships that might draw the attention of the wolves to the heavily camouflaged Sun Hol­low. But the apparent refugee starship is a ruse, and its sole survivor has actually come looking for de Ruyter, who is neither who or what he believes himself to be. Intermittent flashbacks reveal not only de Ruyter’s identity but a history of complex intrahuman warfare, of personal and political betrayals, and of adventures only glanc­ingly addressed in this novel. Nor is that starship survivor, Glass, the ordinary human woman that she seems to be, and her nature and powers are only partly revealed by the end of the novella-length Part One that sets up the rest of the tale.

Glass and her miraculously potent stealth star­ship take de Ruyter on a multi-stage mission in search of a weapon that can hold off the wolves, and along the way his old self slowly starts to re­assert itself. There are several stops on this hunt: a ruined and derelict zombie starship/AI calling itself John the Revelator; the ruins of the Glitter Band and Chasm City (setting for The Prefect, Elysium Fire, and Chasm City) and the horrific Swine House; an ocean world hosting the alien Pattern Jugglers, who can unmake and remake those who swim with them; and the crushing depths of a gas-giant world where the crucial weapon is hidden. Glass and “de Ruyter” are joined by characters with similarly complicated histories: the potent post-human Lady Arek; the damaged medic Probably Rose; and Pinky, a smart-mouth hyperpig who is more human – and perhaps more courageous and steadfast – than the posthumans he accompanies.

The whole story is haunted by memories and histories and tangled relationships growing out of fraught backstories: lost loves and friendships, failures and betrayals, desperate conflicts and sacrifices and escapes and extinctions – both the personal and the deep past rolling over the unsuspecting present. Throughout, the busy mix of SF tropes provides a metaphor-rich environment that makes the novel more than a series of gosh-wow special effects sequences and encounters-with-marvels. “I was/became a different person” is not a metaphor here, and the transformations wrought by time and trauma and dire necessity underlie the convolutions of the sprawling storyline. The Stapledonian vision includes reflections on the constraints on action in the physical world, the need to do the neces­sary without consideration of personal cost, ac­cepting forced choices, and above all persisting, refusing to give up. As Pinky, who is as close as this book gets to a normative character, puts it, “The universe doesn’t give a damn about what’s fair and right.”

We keep not dying. We’re hanging in. We’re a jumble of different ideas and different ways of living, and we squabble, and some of us smell a little funny, actually some of us smell really funny, but the main thing is this. We’re not a bunch of identical black cubes with only one idea in the universe. We’re messy and broken and we make stupid mistakes but we aren’t stupid, mindless machines that are too dumb to realise their programming no longer makes any sense. We’re people. Fish people, pig people, people-people, creepy zombie spider people….

So there are calculated risks, unavoidable costs, acceptable sacrifices, survivable injuries, tradeoffs, rocks and hard places (one of the stops is the planet Charybdis) – all in order to survive a bit longer, to find a way of slowing the wolves (who can’t really be defeated)

Not that there aren’t enough gosh-wow sequences to satisfy the most wonder-hungry reader: the perspective shift when an enormous cavern is recognized as the interior of a ruined starship like “the cloisters of some abandoned cathedral, wreathed in pale worming vines and slowly succumbing to ruin and time;” a descent into a gas giant where pressures are measured in tens of thousands of atmospheres; swimming with the Pattern Jugglers, “an information-storage biomass, intelligent in some respects but not re­ally conscious in any sense that we’d recognise,” generating shapes from their million-year-deep memories. And the book keeps uncorking new revelations right to the end.

Absolution Gap is set among several overlapping time periods and locales. One storyline takes up after the end of Redemption Ark, on the water planet of Ararat, where Clavain and the human-pig hybrid Scorpio landed with the Nostalgia for Infinity to escape the encroaching Inhibitors. When a space pod arrives, carrying Ana Khouri, their quiet life of exile is forever. This is soon followed by the discovery of Skade, a Conjoiner from the previous books, who has done something extraordinarily cruel in order to secure a living link to alien technology from the Hades Matrix computer from Revelation Space.

In a separate narrative, we are introduced to Rashmika Els, a 17-year-old girl who lives on the planet Hela, which is dominated by a strange theocracy of Adventists whose main belief is that they must continually observe a star called Haldora. They do this by building moving Cathedrals that trek across the planet along the Way, in a bizarre conflation of the moving city of Christopher Priest’s Inverted World and the complex religious factions of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. The Adventists have been established by Quaische, and they use “indoctrinal viruses” to keep the faithful in line. It’s a strange story to fold into the larger narrative — I spent the entire book wondering what the relevance of Hela was to the fight against the Inhibitors, and Reynolds does not reveal this until the last 100 pages. In fact, despite learning what Haldora really is and how it holds the key to a danger even greater than the Inhibitors as well as a possible salvation for humanity, I just wish the entire storyline was removed from Absolution Gap. It didn’t interest me, the characters’ motivations were murky, and story could have been much better without it.

I won’t describe all the myriad plot details of this 756-page doorstopper. Instead, without straying too far into spoiler territory, let me just say that despite all those pages to work with, the story basically refused to satisfy any of the following questions:

More details on the origins of the “hell-class” cache weapons — Yes, there was some explanation in Redemption Ark, but that only raised much bigger questions that were then completely left hanging. If humanity can create such weapons, why only 40? And what about other measures?

What is the origin of the Hades Matrix computer — an alien creation, yes, but how does it connect with the Inhibitors or any of the other super-powerful alien races in the galaxy? Its role is surprisingly minor.

What happened to the Shrouders, who just disappear stage-left without even a farewell? We learn who they were in Revelation Space, and that was it.

The motivation behind the Inhibitors’ destruction of star-faring races was revealed in Redemption Ark, but once again this raises much bigger questions, so the reader is left sitting at the dinner table, stuck with the bill and no answers.

Though we finally, after hundreds of pointless conflict among human factions, discover the significance of Haldora, Reynolds almost immediately tells us it’s a gas giant-sized Red Herring and we’re not going in that narrative direction. Instead, he turns to an entirely new player that has been quietly lurking in the shadows and keeping tabs on us. And for good measure, with just an an epilogue left, we learn of yet another implacable threat to the galaxy! Good grief, talk about badly-timed revelations.

Overall, my experience with the REVELATION SPACE trilogy, despite high expectations fueled by many positive reviews, has been one mostly of frustration and disappointment. Each author and reader establish a unique relationship, and this one has not been positive so far. However, despite all that, I still plan to read Chasm City, The Prefect, and House of Suns, because you never know, we might still hit it off eventually.

Of note, John Lee narrates this and most of Alastair Reynolds’ other books, and he has a dignified but dry British delivery, a bit like a Shakespearean actor who has been asked to man the cosmetics counter at Harrods, but certainly very competent. I make sure not to blame the content on the narrator.