Review:
The Prefect
By Alastair Reynolds
Hardcover: 410 pages
Publisher: Ace Books/Penguin Group USA
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-441-01591-7
Plot Summary:
Alastair Reynolds takes us once again to his Revelation Space universe, this time to tell a story of human civilization at its height, but with premonitions of a coming fall.
This time Reynolds takes us to the Glitter Band, a vast swirl of habitats orbiting the world of Yellowstone. A hundred million people call the 10,000 habitats of the Band home and live under the principles of the Demarchy, a super democratic society in which instant polling and online voting gives everyone the ability to provide input on virtually every societal decision that needs to be made and that they care to pay attention to (and in Demarchist society, voter apathy is anathema to nearly all).
Panoply is the law enforcement agency of the Glitter Band, charged both with making sure that everyone’s voting rights are preserved, that no one cheats (voter fraud is considered only slightly less odious than murder), and with maintaining a sort of loose cross-habitat law and order force for those times when individual habitat security fails. They are hampered in their task by the general distrust that most of the citizens of the Band have for authority or governmental organizations in general.
Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a sort of detective and general officer of the law in Panoply. It is through his eyes that most of the story is told.
Dreyfus is assigned to investigate a horrible event, the destruction of an outlying habitat in the Band and the death of its 900 inhabitants. Initial investigations seem to point to the Ultra’s, the cyborg humans whose near monopoly on interstellar travel makes them both vital to and not very popular with system bound humanity. A major interstellar diplomatic dust-up seems in the offing, but as things develop Dreyfus comes to believe that something far more sinister is going on. Another player is operating in the Glitter Band and before everything is done Dreyfus and Panoply will face betrayal, attack, the destruction of Yellowstone’s civilization, and intimations of a future far darker than the brilliance of the Glitter Band present would seem to allow.
OA Relevance: Very High
Reynolds Revelation Space universe is already credited as a major inspiration for OA and this book easily takes its place in that company. Yellowstone and the Glitter Band could easily be a world in the OA universe with only minor modifications. The Demarchist civilization that Reynolds describes is so well described as to seem both weird and believable at the same time. And the technology of Glitter Band civilization, in particular the nanotech “quickmatter” that forms the basis for most systems, machines, and general life is likely to fire the imagination of nearly any OA worldbuilder.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
Reynolds does a phenomenal job throughout pretty much all of the book. However, I did find myself wondering a little bit about the apparent lack of monitoring and communication within the Glitter Band itself. For all that the Band is a single civilization, there seemed at times to be very little communication among its many habitats even though such communication is implied and mentioned in various places. A major example is that an entire habitat can be destroyed with no one appearing to initially notice or that it seems possible to move among the elements of the Band almost unnoticed if one wants to. Given how heavily even our comparatively primitive civilization is able to monitor its airspace, it seemed at times a bit of stretch that this sort of thing could go on in the Band. That said, this is a quibble I didn’t really notice until thinking about the story afterward. And it is something easily ignored in the heat of the story.
The only other issue I found with this story is that it is a prequel to Reynold’s earlier books. As such I read it already knowing some of what was to happen in the Glitter Bands future which added a bit of melancholy.
Overall Rating: Excellent
If you are already familiar with Reynolds and the Revelation Space universe, you’ll love this latest addition. If you’re not, this will make a phenomenal introduction.
*****
More about the reviewer, Todd Drasher, here.