Eversion

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Reynolds, Alastair (10 March 2019). "Love, Death & Robots". Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon (author's official blog) . Retrieved 12 March 2019. Simone’s lifestyle isn’t without costs. Along with the right clothes, he needs the right memories. And that is when a darker reality emerges, showing why these fluffy idiots can’t care about anything more than matching their outrageously expensive outfits to their false eyelashes. Sad Kapteyn" – Originally published online by the School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London [38] It is no spoiler to say that Reynolds shows how such stories can be moulded to make us better humans. But memories can also be weaponised to keep our identities in stupefied thrall to capitalism, and this darker aspect gets an ample airing in Oliver Langmead’s Glitterati.

Understanding Space and Time" – Originally published in a limited edition of 400 copies for the Novacon 35 Sci Fi convention; reprinted in Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition (2006, ISBN 978-0-8095-5649-6), Rich Horton, ed.; and in Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005 (2006), Jonathan Strahan, ed. Simone and his fabulous friends and enemies are suspended in a vicious, never-ending battle for status, fought through clothes, make-up and accessories, sometimes leaving literal fashion victims in their wake. This sense of dangerously pointy high stakes beneath the ruffles and froth recalls writers like Edith Wharton, whose stories dissect the mores of the very rich who lived and schemed during the so-called Gilded Age of the 19th-century US. Alastair Reynolds has already proved himself a master of intelligent space opera such as Shadow Captain - with Eversion he enters more exotic territory, giving us an SF novel where things are much more weird and wonderful, and he succeeds equally well here. The Locus Index to SF Awards: 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award". Locusmag.com. 29 April 2009. Archived from the original on 17 September 2012 . Retrieved 10 June 2013.

Alastair Reynolds’ atmospheric descriptions of the different time periods were so well done. In each time period, Doctor Coade is addicted to some kind of substance. First it’s opium, and later morphine. At one point, photography has been invented and we get to see how the characters use it on the ship. We also get to witness the progression of medicine, as Coade is always a doctor, but his equipment and methods keep evolving as the story goes along. In the beginning, he’s treating a patient with a serious head injury, and later that same character appears with the same injury, but medical practices have improved, and so Coade is able to better help his patient. I found this evolution fascinating!

I found the novel to be conceptually related to Reynolds’ 2004 stand-alone novel Century Rain. In fact, the first chapter of Century Rain was included after the conclusion of this novel as a teaser. If you liked that, you will like this too.Five of his novels and several of his short stories take place within one consistent future universe, usually now called the Revelation Space universe after the first novel published in it, although it was originally developed in short stories for several years before the first novel. Although most characters appear in more than one novel, the works set within this future timeline rarely have the same protagonists twice. Often the protagonists from one work belong to a group that is regarded with suspicion or enmity by the protagonists of another work. While a great deal of science fiction reflects either very optimistic or dystopian visions of the human future, Reynolds's future worlds are notable in that human societies have not departed to either positive or negative extremes, but instead are similar to those of today in terms of moral ambiguity and a mixture of cruelty and decency, corruption and opportunity, despite their technology being dramatically advanced. Death's Door" – originally published in Infinity's End, Solaris Press (July 2018), Jonathan Strahan ed. Sleepover" – originally published in The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF (May 2010), Mike Ashley, eds. If you’re a fan of Reynold’s space operatic stories, you’ll need to adjust your expectations, but patience gets a big reward in this perfectly executed novel. Eversion is a finely written science fiction mystery that I could not put down.