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432 pages, ebook
First published October 12, 2021
“All our human adventuring was no more than a scuff on the final page; unwarranted, barely noticed.”
After reading this, I ended up perusing Revelation Space wiki, which in addition to spoilers for the rest of the series (and before you gasp, I could not care less about spoilers; it’s my reading quirk) also gave me an insight into what happens after the events covered in this book, as it apparently fits somewhere in the last half of the timeline of that world — and all in an say is - okay then. Alastair Reynolds has a definition of optimism that’s different from standard.
About eight centuries in the future the human society, after briefly flourishing interstellarly and surviving the Melding Plague, has fallen prey to the Inhibitors (a.k.a. “the wolves”) - ancient entities working on eliminating spacefaring civilizations. Humanity now survives in tiny hidden pockets as the former hubs of life have been destroyed and ruins of former space habitats drift lifelessly, looking at eventual full extinction. Of course, there are those who find ways to fight back, and given far far future, there are enough ultra-augmented humans (and bioengineered sentient pig descendants, actually) to come up with a way to resist.
“We saw the lights go out, you and I. We have seen the ships stop flying and the worlds fall into silence. One by one we have watched the beacons of civilisation gutter into darkness. We have stood vigil in the twilight. There is no future for us now except a few squalid centuries, and only then if we are very lucky. But the Incantor buys us possibility. It hinges our history onto another track. It may be better, it may even be worse, but the one thing we can be sure of is that it will be different. And if after a few centuries we begin to understand that there have been consequences to our use of the Incantor, we shall meet them. We shall pay for our actions. But we shall have lived, and that is better than the alternative.”
“We’re fighting monsters. We don’t have to become monsters ourselves.”
“Presumably none of their previous funeral ceremonies had had to contend with an overly loquacious pig, and they had no contingency in place.”
Accompaniment of Shadows
Bride of the Wind
Faint Memory of Hokusai
Gnostic Ascension
Dominatrix
Lark Descending
Madonna of the Wasps
Nostalgia for Infinity
Melancholia of Departure
Pelican in Impiety
Silence Under Snow
Transfigured Night
Voice of Evening
The Silence in Heaven