“I've never extrapolated anything this convoluted”
—The Mademoiselle
(Ace hardcover edition, ISBN 0441008356, c.2000, p.149)
Ever heard the phrase, “. . . everything but the kitchen sink”?
Well, the main stage—hereto known as the “everything”—for
this opera is the starship Nostalgia for
Infinity, affectionately
called a “lighthugger” for its stellar-speed drive built by a mysterious
race named The Conjoiners, who, apparently, left them around the
universe like abandoned McLaren F-1s with the keys in the ignition.
It is a marvelous fictional invention: the size of a city, yet managed
by a few when they're not in “reefersleep”, this nano-tech, cyber-structured,
self-replicating-of-anything ciphership is filled with huge,
abandoned sections, a gunnery containing “hell-class weapons” (p.366)
powerful enough to blow a planet, a very active contagion called
The Melding Plague turning the interiors and machinery into Silly
Putty along with The Captain, who was brain scrambled by the Pattern
Jugglers—“world-sized
. . . vast informational sponges” (p.83) that re-arrange your synapses
for obscure reasons—and is now “glittering and uncomfortable mucoid” (p.179)
somewhere in the ship's bowels. You see, the “everything”, directed
by the supposed villain Ultra Triumvir Sajaki who is described by
an adversarial crewmember as “a
megalomaniac” (p.322)—but I think she's being way too superfluous
in her judgment, and, shhhhh, it isn't even Sajaki!—is
on a quest to fix itself, until it incorporates a scientist-politician-philosopher-engineer-archaeologist
named Sylveste, who, with the threat of a nuclear bomb embedded in
his mechanical eyes, re-defines the mission to discover—guess what?—the
Kitchen Sink. Did I mention Sun Stealer, essentially a software program
that takes over “everything” and also knows all about the mysteries
of The Sink but ain't talkin'?
I've pretty much jumped ahead to Acts II & III
here, but don't skip Act I, because it introduces you to the
fascinations and frustrations to come. In this, his first novel,
author Reynolds starts you in medias res on a three-prong
scramble of un-related storylines, fills you up with techno-jargon,
societal lexicon, and conceptual mumbo-jumbo from a universe conceived
so far into the future that any continuity questionings can just
be hurled into the Cornucopia of Literary License. Then, while
you forge forward with brows furrowed, he backstories with — boom! —The
Ol' Info Block Dump just in time to forestall bailout. Quite frankly,
it is an amateurish use of a legitimate writing technique that
he alters and uses again in Act II & III. This time,
his third-person omniscient narrators—we're supposed to be ridin'
on their shoulders overseeing, right?—withhold critical information
not from other characters, but from its nail-biting and still-confused
audience for no other reason than to create Misssstery An' Susssspense.
Chapter after chapter ends like the drop of a club foot. I felt soiled.
Act III winds down with a boxcar-like string
of climaxes only bested by possibly Jackson's inability to end
his version of The Lord of the Rings. Funny thing is,
I did enjoy the ride, I really did, really. But, although there's
these worked gems of delineation—“she
was like an origami sculpture of a woman folded from razor-sharp
paper” (p.263)—characters
feel incongruous and unfinished.
Of the three main personalities—Dan Sylveste, Khouri, and Ilia Volyova—Sylveste,
the intellectual piledriver, isn't even his own man. Well, that's a maybe, as
he's possibly clone-created and carries a beta-level simulation implant of his
long-dead father to confer with on scientific matters between hissy fights.
The relationship with his newlywed Pascale Dubois—who
has no face I can conjure, but is the daughter of the leader of the
insurrectionist greenies in antithesis to her husband—is
about as heartfelt and intimate as a chromium bolt. He's more a force
of pursuance than a person. Khouri, the ex-soldier
who we meet murdering people who have asked to be assassinated for
sport, has already got another voice in her head with veiled, clandestine
motives, even before she boards “everything” and receives “loyalty
implants”, and another sentient software entity sneaks into
her cranium to hopelessly stir her to motivational mush.
She's a convenient post-a-note repository for the author's ideas
and plot inter-antics. Besides, she's too much of an emotional toadstool
to be the heroine, which leaves the Ultra—a distinction of chimerical
humans addicted to spacefaring, “evidenced by their tendency towards
. . . flaunted body augmentations, swathes of black leather and acres
of glinting jewellery, tattoos and trade-trophies” (p.68)—Triumvir
Ilia Volyova. She's the Russkie mega-engineer; keeping the ship
functioning one step ahead of the “infectious alien mind parasites” (p.413),
murderous, mechanical janitor rats, the malignant Melding Plague
turning “everything” to fungal goo, and, dearest to her heart, creator
and taskmistress of “Byzantine engines of war” (p.357) that no one's
quite sure how to employ. There's nothing else in her head but a
God-forced split personality, for, you see, when we first meet her,
she's looking to shanghai a naïve recruit to replace the one
she's murdered because he didn't follow orders. Later, she fakes
slaughtering an outpost of colonists when it's more economical and
efficient just to flatline them. Her actions and perceptions introduce
Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, yet the author wants her to be Ellen Ripley
of Aliens.
No matter what, she's an ice-cold killer guided by the
practices of
an indifferent universe, and an impenetrable persona about as
easy to warm up to as T-X from Terminator 3.
This alluvium of babble—affectionately now
called “my
postmortem review”—is willfully sewn together with confusing and
out-of-context plot threads to emphasize Reynolds' overactive sub-plots,
storylines, backstories, explanations, minor and major character
histories, ideas, notions, and directions plus inadequate layman
science sketches (he's an astrophysicist with a PhD in astronomy)
that he's quilted together with questionable and unmastered prose
techniques. He's a strong writer with a hyper-drive imagination,
just an undisciplined one. I'd recommend reservations before leaving
Chasm City with these doodles, which, incidentally, is the title
of his second novel existing in this same universe and a far superior
read. In fact, it was the noirish haunting of its remembrance that
turned me back for further exploration. Even though there are now
a half a dozen more expeditions into this world, Revelation
Space has
cured me of any additional adventures.
