Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

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I'd also like to note that although the main characters (Tanner, his former boss Cahuella, the infamous Sky Hausmann) are well drawn and motivated, it's very hard to root for any of them: the true representatives of dehumanized technical society, don't look for a hero to follow in this book. In the midst of his hunt, he begins experiencing virus-induced flashbacks from the life of Sky Haussmann, the founder of his home world, Sky's Edge, who is both revered and reviled for the crimes he committed for his people.

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 one time high-tech utopia has become a Gothic nightmare: a nanotechnological virus has corrupted the city's inhabitants as thoroughly as it has the buildings and machines. 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.Humanity survived though, falling back onto long abandoned technology such as steam power, and the city stratified itself into two layers: The Mulch, and The Canopy. Reynolds briskly flogs the story along, never letting up the tension, or slackening the flow of brilliant ideas. Chasm City, the largest on Yellowstone, is now a semi-post-apocalyptic ruin in which the lucky survivors (of which there are still millions) have removed their swish sci-fi implants and rely on more fundamental technology like bulky mobile phones and honest-to-god steam power.

Between Tanner and Hausmann Reynolds sketches a vivid and brutal future, and a surprising story of revenge, betrayal and the consequences of relentless ambition. Chasm City A virus attacks both man and machine in Chasm City, a domed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planet. It deals with themes of identity, memory, and immortality, and many of its scenes are concerned primarily with describing the unusual societal and physical structure of the titular city, a major nexus of Reynolds's universe.They do not live, nor breathe, nor have any life of their own aside from the author's every manipulation. The narrative is tight and well told with very little "fluff" or areas where you feel the plot is dragging - each side plot feels essential to a story you know you just don't have all the pieces of yet but you WANT to find out because you also care about the characters, they're conflicted and multi-dimensional enough to be interesting, and you just get sucked right into the story. There are quite a few scientists who are writing sf but (IMO) Reynolds is the best story teller and prose stylist among them. In Chasm City Reynolds seems to be paying homage to cheesy who-dun-its, plot-twisty detective novels and overwrought crime thrillers.

The adventures of tougher-than-nails quick-witted gun-for-hire Tanner Mirabel set against the technological and biological wonders of interstellar space of the distant 25th century are truly original and amazing. Originally settled by self-replicating robots carrying the genetic material to construct humans on site ahead of a more conventional colonisation. his struggle from a murky childhood to dangerous adulthood is compelling to watch, and his story has enjoyable classic sci-fi elements: space travel, politics, and aliens.am i to believe this story was truly about redemption when sky, cahuella, and the protagonist were all villainous assholes, only for the protag to become a Good Guy in a 3-page epilogue? Several of my GR friends have read Chasm City and had mixed reactions ranging from "it sucks" to "it's just okay. Reynolds uses some inventive methods, or at least clever twists on older methods, for revealing both the characters' pasts and the history of the worlds in which the story is set. He works from a fairly hard-SF mindset, so most of the tech in Chasm City is pretty plausible, ranging from nanotech ‘medichines’ in people’s blood to gigantic sub-light ships that take decades to cross the expanses between stars. The plot was intriguing, the characters were interesting and if Chasm City wasn't fascinating enough on it's own we also get the back story of the first generation ships to leave the Solar System on a centuries long mission to colonize Journey's End or what would become more commonly known as Sky's Edge.