the book being written in first person makes this even worse, where i had to suffer through mirabel telling me he can Shoot Real Good From The Hip, Knows Much Combat, and how he “has a blandly handsome face”, like the one of a “moderately successful actor”. It raises all sorts of questions about the implications that memory-scanning and -altering technology has for individuality and personhood. Having recently finished another novel about a generation ship, I was struck by certain similarities (though I much prefer how Reynolds handled it).

I found myself somewhat rooting for the other trying to take over his mind long before the twists made it super plausible as well as inevitable. 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. One of the main characters contracts this virus, which implants the memories of a revered historical figure, thereby revealing key historical facts. Gone are the simple plots and tropes of your typical TV sci-fi, there is crazyness and creativity at every turn within these pages.The first follows a security operative, Tanner Mirabel, as he hunts a fugitive through what was once humanity’s greatest and most advanced civilisation, now reduced to a tangled, twisted slum by a disease that preys on nanotechnology. As the buildings, implants, and technology that ran Chasm City were disrupted and ran amok, the city as it then existed was effectively destroyed along with its golden age. The Melding Plague is a nano-tech plague that attacks advanced technology and morphs it into a bizarre and degenerate conflation of organic and mechanical life. There was a discussion on Twitter the other day I can no longer find in which somebody referred to Dune – both the recent Villeneuve adaptation and the franchise – as “mostly vibes,” and not as an insult. g. body mods, memory implants, nanotech, DNA manipulation, immortality, reefersleep to travel through time and space).

Long dead (crucified, in fact), Sky’s memories somehow survive in a kind of virus that a cult passes on to travellers. Cool ideas here include an in-depth consideration of a generation ship-type mission, a different take on cybernetic implants, musings on the psychological impact of virtual immortality and a richly imagined post-plague dystopia.

And nano machinery that made art of buildings was infected to transform the city into something grotesque and treelike. If you think about the logistics of it too much it falls apart (how do they still have expensive restaurants for the rich and thus currency, or capitalism at all?

I didn't think we'd find anyone that good again after Banks died, but then I read the Inhibitor Series and was immediately sucked into Reynolds' story telling and world building in very much the same way.Too many damned words that contributes little to the reader's understanding of the world, its history, etc. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World and The Drowned World, along with elements of the dying earth riot of plant-life profusion of Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse. 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. I give it TWO STARS for further delving into the Revelation Space world, and for being well-written at a sentence-by-sentence level, but needs much editing and plot-tightening to become a truly engaging novel.