I have to agree with the earlier suggestion that Redemption Ark is a slow read, particularly during its first third - roughly 230 pages. I appreciate the hard science, the frequent flashes of imagination, and the detailed descriptions, but the characterization isn't all that strong. And we have one sappy character, Thorn, who gets way too much attention from Reynolds and, for that matter, deference from the other characters.

When the novel reached 670 pages, the author seems to have thrown in the towel and decided to end it as soon as possible. The remaining 20+ pages read like an epilogue (even before the formal "epilogue"), as outcomes are quickly explained to us that would have been better dramatized in full, since they represent the culmination of the novel. At least one or two important points are not explained at all. This is really a failure in planning the novel - or maybe a failure by Reynolds' editor. Some readers are bound to feel disappointed, if not cheated.

"Redemption Ark" is billed as a sequel to Mr. Reynolds's intriguing "Revelation Space, and in some sense it is; but it's much more than that. It brings back a few of the characters--and settings--of its predecessor, but it veers off in a totally unexpected direction. The author introduces plenty of new characters--human, machine, and combinations of the two--and new puzzles. The conflicted warrior Nevil Clavain assumes the hero's role and Skade (of the detachable head) serves as his bizarre opponent.

Clavain is intriguing: like the lonely private eyes of the hardboiled detective tradition, he doesn't always quite know what's going on; and his plans don't always work quite as designed. He battles the life-destroying Inhibitors (machine intelligences that want to "inhibit" intelligent life), the forces unleashed by Skade, and a few others as well. Spaceship captain Antoinette Bax and her mechanic and more than friend Xavier Liu, who are enlisted in Clavain's pickup army, supply the human factor. Their heads aren't detachable, and they don't deal in cosmic issues; they just want to survive. And then there's Scorpio--he's a . . . err, never mind. Best if you see for yourself.

There's plenty of great science here, too. The author, an astronomer by trade, instructs his readers on how to destroy a star, and how a starship might gain sentience of its own. And the author's technique is unorthodox, he writes as though he's saying to his audience, "look--we've all read space operas--we all know how battles go." So he pretty much shows you more of the befores and afters, and less of the action than do many authors. Some may be put off. I thought it was clever.

Picking up 50 years after where Revelation Space left, this fantastic hard science fiction novel (second of a trilogy) once again brings a cast of characters - some new and some from the first book - from light years apart (in time and space) and builds their story arcs until the collide and the climax of the book.

In the 26th century, humans have split into factions: the Conjoiners, with their augmented mental abilities and group mind capabilities; the Demarchists, who hate human augmentation of any kind and losing their war with the Conjoiners over control of the Yellowstone system (which they don't realize the Conjoiners may not want anymore); Ultras - cyborgs, that started out human - who pilot trade ships between the stars; and everyone else, who are mostly out for their own gain, survival, or both.

When centuries old Clavain learns that the Conjoiners have learned of the Inhibitors - semi-intelligent machines charged the suppresion of intelligent life in the galaxy - is the source of all of the extinct civilizations on the brink of space travel for the last few hundred million years and that they plan to run and leave the rest of humanity to suffer the same fate, he defects from the Conjoiners and travels into the heart of the enemy looking for allies to help him recover a cache of Hell Weapons, stolen from the Conjoiners decades before, that are in the Delta Pavonis system on an Ultra lighthugger; weapons that the Conjoiners want back as well.

Meanwhile, 50 years after Revelation Space, in the Delta Pavonis system, the survivors of that same lighthugger are struggling to guide the colony of 200,000 living on Resurgam under a brutal authoritarian government towards their salvation from the Inhibitors, who have arrived in system after being alerted by the activities that brought Revelation Space to conclusion (I will leave out the details for those a book behind). The Inhibitors have begun to dismantle some moons in the system with the goal of building an extinction weapon.

Clavain's rag-tag army and the Conjoiners giving chase are heading to Resurgam unaware of the system's fate and their roll in it. I am so looking forward to reading the conclusion in Absolution Gap!

It's a year since I finished Revelation Space but, finishing Redemption Ark yesterday, I had the distinct impression that was a much better written book.

Reynold's strength is clearly his ability to come up with those hard scientific ideas that are a foundation of SF, but perhaps he doesn't know that - no matter what the genre - characters are at the foundation of any good story. In this area I believe Reynolds' has failed to develop plausible, complex and interesting characters. Perhaps total failure is too strong a word, but certainly next to the strength of his SF ideas the characterisation is very weak.

Perhaps the biggest glaring problem I had is this: This is an optimistic view of the technology and spread of humanity seven hundred years into the future, but also a attempt at realism - so why has their actually humanity barely developed in this period? Why has society and culture hardly evolved?

Reynolds makes half-hearted attempts to invent new social organisations. The Conjoiners are his prime example and tantalising reference to them is made in the first book. Here, we finally get some details only to learn that beneath the surface they resemble every other human group in the book - being populated by self-serving squabbling humans who nonetheless all exhibit remarkable ability to do high-level physics on the fly but are unable to progress beyond the petty competitiveness and oneupmanship that dominated their collective pasts.

We get told of bigger, broader motives - Clavain's desire to save humanity - but we never really FEEL them. Reynold's DESCRIBES a lot of internal conflict - the decision to blow up Nightshade - but rarely SHOWS us.

In short, I found all the characters to end up being pale imitations of each other and was lead to wonder whether we shouldn't let the Inhibitors destroy this fascinatingly technological yet spritually barren interpretation of humanity's future after all.

There was plenty more to indicate to me Reynolds is already falling away into a being a churner of mass-produced triviality, something rife in the fantasy genre but so far less prevalent in SF.

The whole episode of the capture of Zodiacal Light is a glaring omission and could have made one of the best chapters in the book. I was reminded of the contrast between this and Neil Stephenson's Confusion where an entire book is devoted to a swashbuckling boat-capture adventure! Reynolds skims over this with a bare minimum of attention, missing a great opportunity no seasoned storyteller would pass up and also an obvious opportunity to develop Scorpio's and the other pigs' characters (think about how weak Scorpio's evil intent towards humans seems especially after he just changes his mind later on after some cathartic experience we weren't even present for).

Perhaps Reynold's ideas for this book exceeded his ablities on this occasion. If I could offer some advice I would say go back to basics. If he could combine his talent for hard-SF concepts with strong story-telling basics we would have a winner.

While REDEMPTION ARK is similar to the first two books Alastair Reynolds put out, in that these books are HUGE, and take place in the same relative timeframe, this book is a definate improvement in quality versus CHASM CITY and REVELATION SPACE, which were somewhat of a chore to work through. The main reasons this book is better is that the story is much more believable, and the characters are much more easier to relate to - even the ones that were brought forward from the last book in the series. Additionally, this book omits the horribly complicated and unbelievable endings that capped the first two works.

Kudos to the coverage of the "inertia suppression" interstellar drive technology; with good descriptions of the development of the technology through experiments, some of which would end catastrophically.

On retrospection, I have to criticise the overemphasis of the importance of the "cache weapons", which are the obsessive focal point of several competing factions, causing them all to converge on a fairly recently human colonized solar system. The book culminates in a four-way system-wide war, in which the weapons turn out to be virtual non-issues.