Review: Galactic North

By Alastair Reynolds

ISBN: 978-0-441-01513-9

In Galactic North, Alastair Reynolds returns to the Revelation Space universe with a collection of eight short stories, set both before and after the time period in his earlier books. The Revelation Space series, for those who are not familiar with it, describes a future centuries hence in which humanity, augmented with nanotechnology and genetic engineering, has split into warring factions and expanded to the stars. The stars in the immediate vicinity of Sol have been colonized by slower than light ships and various strange and disturbing alien artifacts have been found. To avoid spoilers I can’t get much more detailed, but I can say that the books are definitely worth reading and that OA counts Reynolds and his work as one of his primary inspirations.

In Galactic North, we get to see more of this universe as well as some of the same characters that we met in the earlier books. We get to learn more about the history of the Conjoiners, whose technology generated group mind often puts them at odds with other human factions and whose technology forms the basis for most interstellar travel. We see more of the civilizations on Sky’s Edge and Yellowstone, two of the primary colonies in the series, and are treated to stories of both hope and terror in equal measure. And finally, in the title story of the book, we learn something of the origins of a threat that is both only lightly touched on and a core component of the earlier books.

OA Relevance: High

Reynolds’ work is a fundamentall inspiration for OA, and he continues to explore OA-esque ideas in his writing.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Reynolds continues to write in a style and venue that most OA fans will probably enjoy. His work is well constructed and does an excellent job of combining character development with mind stretching big ideas and technological cool. And unlike a lot of ‘additional stories in the same universe’ books you don’t need to have read his earlier works to enjoy these (although it certainly helps). About the only quibble I could really find is that it sometimes seems like there are minor consistency issues between this work and his other stories. Interestingly enough, Reynolds includes an afterword in which he talks about this and explains his take on future histories, which somewhat takes care of the issue. All together a very minor issue when set against a set of eight very good stories.

Overall Rating: Highly Recommended:

If you’ve read the Revelation Space series already and liked it you’ll really like these stories as more of the same. If you haven’t you’ll probably still like them and then want to get yourself to your local bookseller to pick up the other books. Enjoy.

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.