Product Description

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a policeman of sorts, and one of the best. His force is Panoply, and his beat is the multi-faceted utopian society of the Glitter Band, that vast swirl of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone. These days, his job is his life. A murderous attack against a Glitter Band habitat is nasty, but it looks to be an open-and-shut case - until Dreyfus starts looking under some stones that some very powerful people would really rather stayed unturned. What he uncovers is far more serious than mere gruesome murder: a covert takeover bid by a shadowy figure, Aurora (who may once have been human but certainly isn't now), who believes the people of the Glitter Band should no longer be in charge of their own destiny. Dreyfus discovers that to save something precious, you may have to destroy part of it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83944 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Mark Yon, SFFWORLD.COM
"An enjoyable novel which shows Reynolds growth as a writer. Though good before, I think this is one his best novels to date."

Review
"Combines space-roaming adventure with a solid detective story. Fast-paced and inventive, this may be Reynolds' best yet." (Lisa Tuttle THE TIMES )

"THE PREFECT is hugely entertaining and inventive, a compelling fusion of the detective novel and a brilliantly constructed vision of the future. Cracking stuff." (DEATHRAY )

"An enjoyable novel which shows Reynolds growth as a writer. Though good before, I think this is one his best novels to date." (Mark Yon SFFWORLD.COM )

"Politics, ambition and betrayal against the backdrop of Reynolds' Revelation Space universe." (Anthony Browne STARBURST )

"There's enough inventiveness here to keep you entertained for a good while." (SANDSTORM REVIEWS )

"In The Prefect Alastair Reynolds executes an enjoyable and extremely fast-paced return to the universe that made his name. The story develops nicely and explodes into a furious page-turning pace in its second half that barely lets up. The Prefect is Reynolds' best novel since at least Redemption Ark, and is an engrossing read." (THE WERTZONE )

"This is a book about freedom, its limits and how much liberty we should sacrifice in the name of safety - pertinent themes suggesting a new political edge to Reynolds' work." (Jonathan Wright SFX )

"A welcome return to his Revelation Space universe." (EDGE )

SANDSTORM REVIEWS
"There's enough inventiveness here to keep you entertained for a good while."

Customer Reviews

Entertaining but not Reynolds' best
Even though it is set in the Revelation Space universe there is a sense in The Prefect that this is Reynolds in sci-fi pulp form rather than the hard literary science-fiction and expansive scale of the other books in the series or of the remarkable Pushing Ice. It does at least mean that the book is certainly more accessible, rarely faltering in pace and managing to hold the reader throughout.

The plot is not an intricate one, although it does initially start out as one kind of police investigation by the Prefect Dreyfus of Panoply (the law-enforcement system or at least the authorities in charge of the upholding of the democratic process of the ten thousand habitats of the Glitter Band), looking into the destruction of one of the habitats and over 900 people and finding that behind it there is a threat on another scale entirely.

With megalomaniacal computer entities, killer robots, invading forces threatening to sweep across the whole of the Glitter Band, internal rivalry, espionage and sabotage, there are plenty of challenges for Drefus and his associate Thalia Ng to face and lots of plot-holes for Reynolds to plug with deus ex-machina devices, but this is still entertaining stuff, if not Reynolds at his best.

Peerless
IF you don't like sci-fi, don't like tightly plotted detective fiction, don't like tension, drama and emotion in your books then you should read this anyway and see what you are missing.
You might go back to the Mr Men books afterwards but at least you will have read a masterpiece in your lifetime.

cracking adventure story
If there is a better SF writer than Alastair Reynolds currently working, I'd love to know who it is because he/she must be something extremely special.

This novel is a return to the universe of Revelation Space, and a very welcome return it is too. Reynolds has created a complex, consistent, fascinating background to his stories, richer than that produced by the vast majority of other SF writers.

This story is a cross between a detective novel and a page turning adventure yarn. It starts almost (almost gently) with an investigation of voting fraud (yes, voting fraud) but quickly ramps up into a complex multi-layered tale with potential civil war between factions of humanity, horrific robotic genocide, treachery, and insane artificial intelligences.

So if SF, and definitely hard SF, not fantasy, is your bag, this novel is definitely one for you. Highly recommended.