Collection of short stories across a long time, all enjoyable but for the most part interesting rather than page turners.
Non-essential, but glad I have read this book. All adds to the future history fun. ( )

This review is just for the last short in this collection, also titled, "Galactic North".   This story comes after Absolution Gap in the timeline.

This is bizarre.   After three trilogy length novels -- two spanning decades and one a few centuries -- going into glorious detail and getting the reader really involved with the characters and their situations, we now have a story spanning tens of millennia that's only a short: WTF?

It all feels extremely rushed, utterly lacking in depth and just seems like Alastair threw it together before breakfast to meet some publisher's needs before he went on holiday.

Ho hum, we can't really expect all of Alastair's books to be excellent.   This one's very disappointing.

Anyways, this is the last story in the whole series for now.   Just a bit of a wait until Inhibitor Phase is released on 26th August 2021.

It's certainly been a blast reading the whole series in one go, it was just under 3 months ago when i began Great Wall of Mars.   And no inbetweenies due to boredom: this is one of those series that you just want to keep on reading without any other books getting involved.

Available in the collection, Galactic North. ( )

The short stories are very good. Doesn't really add too much to the overall story, but it's very nice indeed. ( )

A collection of 8 stories set in Revelation Space. It’s interesting that several of the quoted reviewers on the cover of the book refer to the “gothic flavor” of the stories. My appreciation of “gothic” comes from reading Merritt, Lovecraft, Derleth, Hodgson and Poe. Gothic seems now to refer distorted minds and/or emotions and desperately bizarre endings. Not my style. As you’ll see, most of Renyolds’ stories are woven around the theme of revenge…only sometimes you don’t know it until the end.

Forgive me, but I don’t like feeding on emotional illness anymore and will no longer spend my time reading Reynolds. His writing style can, indeed, be good—except where he’s forced to twist the plot to incorporate his seeming fixation on revenge: can he not conceive of any other theme for his stories?

1. Great Wall of Mars: the Conjoiners are people who are “emotionally healthy” Borgs, trying to escape from the revilement of normal humans. A decent story with a good ending [4*]

2. Glacial: the direct sequel to Great Wall of Mars, after they’ve migrated to another star system. Here they must solve a murder mystery before they move on. At this point—especially after Renyolds’ Revenger book—I think could now probably identify a book by Reynolds from the style. Now the “darkness” settles in. [4*]

3. A Spy in Europa: makes the Conjoiners look normal as we explore real divergence from standard humanity. The story itself is entertaining…but the ending fails with an episode of bizarreness: if you need blood to complete your group’s evolution you extract it and disseminate it…you don’t splash it all over the ocean and hope that everyone gets a share. [3.5* because of the ending]

4. Weather: a decent story, as far as it goes (dealing with more of the hybrid peoples in Revelation Space)—a ship, with its cargo of cryogenic passengers, is about to be hijacked by pirates but pulls off a last ditch turn-around and wipes out the pirates…but when they find and save a conjoiner it pushes the envelope of emotional reality. [3.5* as dark as his writing style is, the story ends on a potentially intriguing note. But, in one of the following stories the “intriguing” note turns out to have been another failing revenge (as a side note in history)]

5. Dilation Sleep: again, the writing style is good—a crew member is awakened from his cryogenic sleep to save the ship, but, after some twisty eerie gyrations, the end is disconnected from the beginning and feels like an afterthought. [3.5*]

6. Grafenwalder’s Bestiary: Reynolds displays a consistent flaw—for all his literary skills, he tries too hard for a surprise ending and winds up distorting the plot line such that the ending barely makes sense; but in this story it makes no sense at all. At least to me. If you like the story as is, I won’t try to spoil it for you merely because I don’t like it. The plot: amongst a select group of extremely rich people the protagonist must—at all costs—have the most unique animal in his private zoo…and it costs him more than he expects.

7. Nightingale: a disappeared super-medical ship hosting a legendary villain is found by a group intent on bringing the villain back to justice; only to find that the ship has other ideas. Renyolds has an avid imagination…if only it weren’t so distorted. [3.5*]

8. Galactic North: a sequel to some of the prior stories that continues the theme for revenge as the universe winds due to some prolific leftovers from the prior wars. [3.5*] ( )

This very solid set of hard-SF stories demonstrates that Reynolds really does write short fiction well. The structures are tight and the plots open as they go rather than all-at-once, the pacing varies as needed but seldom drags, and his characters are really credible, even the trans-human. The big caveat with this anthology is that it is of his Revelation Space universe, and not an intro to it either; a reader really should read Reynolds' RS novels before hitting this for full enjoyment.

Not that the stories are all of equal strength. "Glacial" and "Weather" are crisp, brilliant, and truly entertaining: superior short fiction. "Great Wall of Mars" is an essential piece of RS backstory, and would make a neat stand-alone Netflix movie. However, "Nightingale" drags and, unless you're an unrepentant horror-story buff, doesn't really offer up much originality; Reynolds claims in the Afterword that "Dilation Sleep" is the earliest published of the stories and it shows in its infodumps, technobabble, and window-dressing that he was just getting his sea-legs. The final, title story was most problematic to me: it reaches too far and comes across as a truly nihilistic take on Anderson's _Tau Zero_, but your mileage may vary.

If you've read _Revelation Space_ (and if you have not, please do!) and want some more in bite-size pieces before tackling another thick novel, start here. These are good stuff. ( )