More than five hundred years from now, mankind has finally left Earth behind, recreating itself in a hundred different ways to deal with the rigors of space, the inhospitality of alien planets, the dissatisfaction with their original form. As immense starships called lighthuggers ply their trade between planets, traveling at the speed of light so that even a short journey might cover decades, as the colonists of Yellowstone continue to recover from the Melding Plague which joined flesh and machine with disastrous results, and as people enter the planetary oceans of the Pattern Jugglers to have the inconceivably alien micro-organisms rearrange their minds to achieve new levels of thinking, a billion-year old secret is about to be uncovered at long last. And we’ll finally know just why we’re all alone in the universe. Why our calculations, postulating the existence of other spacefaring races, have been wrong.

Revelation Space is a complex space opera, taking place on truly mindboggling levels, the narrative itself spanning decades, the overall story covering billions of years. While it starts off with the relatively small quest of archaeologist Dan Sylveste as he attempts to unravel the secrets of the Amaratin civilization, dead for over nine hundred thousand years, it soon expands to reveal a far greater complexity and scope. Sylveste’s quest takes on Ahab-like proportions as he pursues the answers to his questions at any expense. Joining him are mercenary-turned-assassin Ana Khouri, caught up in the enigmatic manipulations of a woman known only as The Mademoiselle, and Ilya Volyva, part of the cyborg crew of the lighthugger Nostalgia For Infinity. Their separate quests start decades and planets apart, and all come together over the planet Resurgam, once home of the avian-descended Amaratin. Battling betrayal from within and without, facing off against the Mademoiselle’s scheme to have Sylveste assassinated, the bizarre transformation afflicting the captain of the Nostalgia For Infinity, the malevolent and legendary Sun Stealer, these unlikely heroes will journey light-years to discover the awful truth behind the Amaratin annihilation, a truth just waiting to destroy us as well.

Planet-destroying weapons. Brain-altering micro-organisms. Murderous alien artifacts. Gigantic starships suffering from disuse and neglect. A billion-year-old war between the stars. Transformations on the micro and macro levels for humanity. Thinking absolutely nothing of traveling for decades to reach a destination. Aliens who truly think in ways we can’t begin to comprehend. These are just some of the trappings of this densely plotted, multi-layered novel, which more than lives up to the potential of the genre, and breathes new life into it to boot. While it may be hard to see how it all fits together in the beginning, the full picture lies revealed at the end, the threads woven together seamlessly. No easy read, but a book worth taking your time in reading, Revelation Space provokes thought, offering up a future where anything is possible, and our own imagination guides our potential. From bombs smaller than a speck of dust to planet-sized computers, it doesn’t pull its punches. And the closer it gets to the end, the more urgent the story becomes, the stakes as high as they can get on a personal level for the characters, and on a racial level for humanity as a whole.

This book comes with my highest recommendations. I was up late for several nights in a row, constantly looking for a good stopping point, constantly wanting “just a few more pages.” And if this is Alastair Reynold’s first novel, then the genre is in for a real treat with his next work. Don’t miss Revelation Space.