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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Prefect
by Alastair Reynolds
The Prefect starts slowly with the murder of just under 1000 people in one of the Glitter Band habitats in an apparent trade deal gone wrong. Dreyfus is a very special kind of cop, working for an agency called Panoply that focuses on existential threats to the Glitter Band: violations of democratic process, weapons of mass destruction, and conflicts between factions. The destruction of a habitat appears to be local Demarchists vs interstellar Ultras, but the situation smells.
A lot of this will be familiar to people who have read other books in the Revelation Space series. What's new is finally seeing Demarchist society at it's Belle Epoque height, before it was ravaged by the Melding Plague and the Inhibitors. The technology works with Clarkean magic and people are actually decent to each other.
Of course, this being Reynolds, things fall apart quickly. The destruction of the habitat is linked to the scheming of Aurora, an Alpha-level AI that somehow survived the Sylveste institute upload process who escaped into the net. Aurora can sense the Melding Plague coming, but is unable to figure out what it is or how to stop it. She's subverted the head of Panoply's internal security and is planning a take-over of the Glitter Band to make it safe for herself. As for all those pesky humans, well, they'll just have to go.
The only salvation is the Clockmaker, another machine intelligence that 11 years ago broke it's chains in a violent escape that killed several Panoply agents, including Dreyfus' wife, and placed a deadly device on the neck of the current head of Panoply which might kill her. The Clockmaker is a near mythical force of chaos, supposedly destroyed with nuclear weapons, but it's a devil that might not want humanity dead.
The setting is my favorite version of Revelation Space, and the action picks up fast in the last third, but this is yet another Reynolds' protagonist with a damaged memory and dangerous obsessions, and subplot around a group of ordinary citizens trapped in a museum with a Panoply deputy sets up some plot points, but is tedious and barely connected to the rest of the book.
A lot of this will be familiar to people who have read other books in the Revelation Space series. What's new is finally seeing Demarchist society at it's Belle Epoque height, before it was ravaged by the Melding Plague and the Inhibitors. The technology works with Clarkean magic and people are actually decent to each other.
Of course, this being Reynolds, things fall apart quickly. The destruction of the habitat is linked to the scheming of Aurora, an Alpha-level AI that somehow survived the Sylveste institute upload process who escaped into the net. Aurora can sense the Melding Plague coming, but is unable to figure out what it is or how to stop it. She's subverted the head of Panoply's internal security and is planning a take-over of the Glitter Band to make it safe for herself. As for all those pesky humans, well, they'll just have to go.
The only salvation is the Clockmaker, another machine intelligence that 11 years ago broke it's chains in a violent escape that killed several Panoply agents, including Dreyfus' wife, and placed a deadly device on the neck of the current head of Panoply which might kill her. The Clockmaker is a near mythical force of chaos, supposedly destroyed with nuclear weapons, but it's a devil that might not want humanity dead.
The setting is my favorite version of Revelation Space, and the action picks up fast in the last third, but this is yet another Reynolds' protagonist with a damaged memory and dangerous obsessions, and subplot around a group of ordinary citizens trapped in a museum with a Panoply deputy sets up some plot points, but is tedious and barely connected to the rest of the book.