Tanner Mirabel was a security specialist who never made a mistake - until the day a woman in his care was blown away by Argent Reivich, a vengeful young postmortal. Tanner's pursuit of Reivich takes him across light-years of space to Chasm City, the domed human settlement on the otherwise inhospitable planet of Yellowstone. But Chasm City is not what it was. The one-time high-tech utopia has become a Gothic nightmare: a nanotechnological virus has corrupted the city's inhabitants as thoroughly as it has the buildings and machines. Before the chase is done, Tanner will have to confront truths which reach back centuries, towards deep space and an atrocity history barely remembers.

Accolades

Winner of British Science Fiction Association Award 2002.

Reviews

'*Starred Review* Returning to the far corner of the galaxy in which he set his first novel, the stunning Revelation Space (2001), Reynolds brews another intoxicating draught of cutting-edge biology, AI, and alien intrigue in the twenty-sixth century. Professional soldier Tanner Mirabel chases the man who killed his boss and his boss' wife across space and time to the astounding Chasm City, a deep fissure where various mutants dwell in a hierarchical but profoundly decadent society. Hunting a murderer, Tanner is himself hunted in a game devised by Chasm City's bored aristocracy, who maintain immortality by using something called Dream Fuel. Tanner takes his licks but gets ever nearer his goal. Unfortunately, he has been infected with a virus by the Sky Haussmann cult. Haussmann was the human starfarer who led the first colonists to these new worlds. He was either a saint or a cruel criminal, but in any case Tanner begins to remember Haussmann's life as if it were his own, and then to wonder whether Haussmann's memories are his own. He finds out he isn't really Tanner Mirabel, and that his plot for revenge is a silly programmed instruction. Yet he follows through with his mission, discovering the almost nauseating secret of Dream Fuel and his true, multilayered identity in a tale suggesting, in the end, that the darkest secrets of the universe may be in the human heart. Reynolds is on fire.' John Mort, Booklist

'In this worthy follow-up to his well-received first novel, Revelation Space (2001), an especially intelligent far-future foray, British author Reynolds transmutes space opera into a noirish, baroque, picaresque mystery tale. Honor requires that Tanner Mirabel, a weapons specialist/bodyguard, track down and destroy the man who killed his boss. Tanner's pursuit takes him to the planet Yellowstone, where a nano-plague has mutated the glittering human cultural showcase of Chasm City into something bizarre, dark and extremely dangerous. He's aided or threatened or both, at different times by a host of human and not-quite-human characters. Relying on his own combat skills and hard-boiled attitude, Tanner keeps seeking revenge even though he begins to wonder why he's doing it, especially after intrusions of other people's memories lead him to suspect he's not who he thinks he is. Inventiveness and tone are Reynolds's strong points. Presented in a sustained burst of weirdness, the novel's details are consistently startling but convincing in context, and the loose ends eventually tie neatly together. The narrator's tough-guy stance works too, both as an expression of Tanner's personality and as a defensive reaction to the setting's intimidating strangeness. Think of a combination of the movie Blade Runner and one of Jack Vance's ironic SF adventure novels. If the ending feels a bit flat, that's probably inevitable after the exuberant display of wonders earlier.' Publishers Weekly

Author Biography

REVELATION SPACE sold more than 11,000 copies in trade paperback, the most successful debut science fiction novel in decades. The US sale was one of, if not the highest for a British SF writer ever. CHASM CITY is set in the same universe, the middle book of a loosely linked trilogy Cinema and press advertising REVELATION SPACE was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke and the British Science Fiction Association's annual awards.