A prequel series also set at least partly in Chasm City – the Prefect sequence comprising The Prefect ( 2007 vt Aurora Rising: A Prefect Dreyfus Emergency 2017) and Elysium Fire: A Prefect Dreyfus Emergency ( 2018) – are police-procedural tales whose action takes place in the pre-Plague golden age of Yellowstone and its many thousands of advanced orbital Space Habitats. Chasm City ( 2001), which stands slightly to one side of the central narrative, is a noir adventure set on the once highly civilized world Yellowstone, now ruined by infectious alien Nanotechnology (the Melding Plague already featured in Revelation Space) this won the BSFA Award. Further novels in the main Revelation Space/Inhibitors series – direct sequels to Revelation Space – are Redemption Ark ( 2002), and Absolution Gap ( 2003). However, there is no denying the comprehensiveness of Reynolds's vision and its ability to integrate a range of registers from Cyberpunk to Hard SF into the same narrative. Reynolds's adherence in this series to the fact that Faster Than Light travel is impossible means that protagonists can, as in Revelation Space, spend a long time hobbled by the constraints of Relativity en route to each rendezvous and the conclusion of the book.
These artefacts frequently take the form of Big Dumb Objects or Macrostructures whose unlocking drives the plots of the books. The galaxy therefore houses a palimpsest of the remnants of past civilizations, to be discovered by literal or metaphorical archaeologists. The reason intelligent life appears rarely in the universe is because it is periodically culled by enormously powerful mechanisms known as the Inhibitors (see Berserkers).
Its premise is, in a sense, a response to the Fermi Paradox. Preceded by such related short stories as "Dilation Sleep", (September 1990 Interzone #39), "A Spy in Europa" (June 1997 Interzone #120) and "Galactic North" (July 1999 Interzone #145), this was the first full-length work in the Revelation Space/Inhibitors sequence, which occupied much of the early part of his career, and to which he has returned on occasion, a Future History extending for a millennium after its beginning in the moderately distant Near Future around 2200 CE. His first published story was "Nunivak Snowflakes" in Interzone for June 1990, but it was not for another decade that he published his first novel, Revelation Space ( 2000). (1966- ) UK author who has also worked as a physicist and astronomer – notably 1991-2004 at the Netherlands European Space Research and Technology Centre, a division of the European Space Agency – an experience that strongly informs his work.
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