Product Description

The Inhibitors are back and Humanity is doomed! Many, many millennia ago, the Inhibitors seeded the universe with machines designed to detect intelligent life - and then to suppress it. But after hundreds of millions of years, the machines started to fail and intelligent cultures started to emerge. Then Dr Dan Sylveste and the crew of Infinity discovered what had happened to the long-vanished Amarantin race . . . and awakened the Inhibitors. On Yellowstone, where no one is quite who they appear, the Inquisitor and the planet's Most Wanted War Criminal are watching as the Inhibitors turn a small group of planets into raw materials. Whatever they are building with those materials is not going to be good for Humanity. Once again, Al Reynolds has produced a stunning, universe-spanning space opera of mind-blowing proportions. Big in size, big in concepts, REDEMPTION ARK will leave you gasping at its audacity and breathless at its conclusion. This is British SF at its absolute best.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13934 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Redemption Ark is Alastair Reynolds's third hefty SF novel, a direct sequel to his debut book Revelation Space, and also linked with Chasm City, which won the British SF Association Award. Gripping high-tech action features various groups struggling for control of a cache of "hell-class weapons", while the alien Inhibitors--who stamp out space-going intelligence wherever they find it--are busy dismantling planets to build a doomsday engine of awesome size.

Building on the previous books, the interstellar situation is exhilaratingly complex. Major players from Revelation Space are still at large in the solar system containing the new Inhibitor construction site, the vast old starship Nostalgia for Infinity (hideously transformed and merged with its captain by "Melding Plague"), the hell-weapons, and the colonized planet Resurgam--which may need to be evacuated at speed.

Many light years away, the mechanically enhanced human Conjoiners are fighting a space war around Yellowstone, the world of Chasm City. Although victory approaches, the Conjoiners are frantically building advanced starships and planning to run for their lives, thanks to an incredibly dangerous project that sucked information from the future--including news of the Inhibitors. The Conjoiners have their own internal factions, at least one of which isn't what it seems, and a fresh split leads to a tense relativistic race for the Resurgam system and those coveted hell-weapons. Booby-traps and deadly strategems enliven the desperate journey.

Other, non-Conjoiner humans--not to mention machine intelligences and genetically engineered man-pig chimeras--are caught up in the intrigue and violence. Many members of this large cast have inner secrets, other identities, painful relationships, long-concealed guilt. As at last they converge on the Resurgam system, there are jolting surprises.

Meanwhile, the immense past and future of Reynolds' universe becomes clearer, a cosmic tapestry with the deep-time scope of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee series, ranging from the Dawn War in the early aeons of galactic life to a cataclysmic event still three billion years in the future. A disaster which the loathed robotic Inhibitors are working patiently to minimise....

Despite minor glitches in story logic, Redemption Ark is a hugely enjoyable and ambitious interstellar epic, a must-read for fans of SF that operates on a truly colossal scale. --David Langford

About the Author
Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy. Since 1991 he has lived in the Netherlands, near Leiden, where he works as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency. The first three books in his loosely linked series, Revelation Space, nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke and the British Science Fiction awards, Chasm City, winner of the British Science Fiction Award, and Redemprion Ark, are all Gollancz bestsellers.

Customer Reviews

Excellent read - enjoyable hard sci-fi
Redemption Ark is billed as a galaxy spanning hard sci-fi story but the motivations of the lead characters are very human - a love story that has lasted 400 years, a young woman who risks being a casualty of a nasty war just to bury her father in the heart of a sun and a lead character that decides to override hundreds of years of loyalty to a race of humans with a Borg like ability to share thoughts in order to retrieve ultimate weapons that might just save the human species.. If you couple that with a race called the Inhibitors that seem to regard humans who want to explore space as a menace to be surpressed then you have a book that works on both a sci-fi purists level and a personal level. I read the 500 plus pages in 3 days finsihing off at 1 a.m. and was only disappointed that it had finished - although I have to say there are at least three plot lines that could be continued.

An excellent read - one point, if you have read Revalation Space it will make this easier to read but its not essential

A prelude to the Grand Finale
In "Redemption Ark" Alastair Reynolds continues his story of the impending threat to human space faring society we learn about in "Revelation Space". As the other reviewers have pointed out, this book is clearly meant to be part of a series, although I don't think it is crucial to the understanding and enjoyment of the story to have read the prequels (or in fact prequel, since "Chasm City" is more of an independent story, set in the same fictional universe). It is however obviously meant to be a stepping stone leading up to the final decisive struggle against the Inhibitors, of which we should be able to read about in early 2004 or hopefully late next year. By then you will have had plenty of time to catch up on the preceding events should you wish to, which I very much recommend since they are all hugely enjoyable and interesting. Reynolds is an astrophysicist working for the ESA in the Netherlands, and his intimate knowledge of the subject shows in his work. It's this understanding of space and possible future technologies that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries and adds the plausible scientific backdrop to his action packed stories, giving them that sense of reality that makes them so fantastic. For anyone who's interested in Hard SF (science fiction grounded on science fact), or would like to make an excursion into this branch of SF, you can't go wrong with Alastair Reynolds, although you might as well begin with "Revelation Space" and then work your way through, or you might not forgive him the long wait to see what happens next...

Good-but almost brilliant
This book is sooooo frustrating, for a start its better than both Revelation Space and Chasm City, both characterisation and plotting are stronger. Half the characters will be familiar from Revelation Space, with a couple of cameos from Chasm city for good measure. The new characters are his best yet with real depth and complexity - especially Clavain and Skade. The hard science part is excellent with some intriuging concepts. The wolves/inhibitors are excellent as implacable enemies, and the conjoiners add a nice human touch.
The first 400 pages are amongst the best SF I have read, unfortunately its thrown away in the last 150 pages or so, as the author sets things up for a sequel. What should have been the climax is thrown away in a couple of lines and instead we get an epilogue who's sole purpose is to prepare us for said sequel.
This is the authors best work yet but...its crying out for a decent editor. Infact in places it looks like whole subplots were edited out (for reasons of space?) - the lighthugger theft for instance...
I dont wan't to be too negative, this is one of the best SF novels I have read this year, but unfortunately it just falls at the last hurdle and what should have been a great book, becomes just very good.
Hopefully the sequel will be the book this one could have been as the Author improves with every book he writes.