Chasm City

People further than me into Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series say Chasm City is readable at any point: it's a standalone prequel that deepens the setting without being integral to the overarching plot. I was going to adhere to that advice and ignore the novel until later but then the back cover of Redemption Ark's Finnish translation advertised it as the "third book in the series". I thought I might as well read Chasm City first and then continue with Ark.

Chasm City was published in 2001, just a year after Revelation Space, which was Reynolds's first novel, and it's incredible how much his storytelling improved in that time. Unlike Revelation Space, Chasm City's story keeps moving forward fast. It uses two different flashback narratives to keep things interesting.

The novel's protagonist is Tanner Mirabel who is on a mission to avenge the death of his employer. Tanner's background is in military and as an assassin -- an odd repeat of Ana Khouri's occupation in Revelation Space. Tanner's latest job however was as a security expert for his late employer Cahuella.

Tanner's journey starts on Sky's Edge, a planet that was the target of the first human interstellar colonization mission before lighthugger ships were invented. From there, Tanner follows his target to the Epsilon Eridani system and its Yellowstone planet and Chasm City where Ana Khouri started her journey.

The first flashback strand is Tanner reminiscing his past life and his time under Cahuella's service. In one of such flashbacks, when talking about Cahuella, his wife, Gitta, suggests Tanner doesn't know about Cahuella as much as he thinks knows. She suggests Cahuella has done worse things than selling guns to both sides of the planet's civil war.

I read the book in Finnish (the translation once again by Hannu Tervaharju) so I didn't have the following quote in English but I did find it on the internet -- though I'm not sure if it's from the first or second time it comes up in the novel:

"How long would you have to live; how much good would you have to do, to compensate for one act of pure evil you'd committed as a younger man?"

Did Reynolds play Planescape: Torment (1999) before writing Chasm City? The quoted question is so very essence of that game that I'm almost certain he did. Or at least he knew about it. It is a bit suspect though what good is Cahuella actually doing? Or had he decided there was no redemption worth chasing? Or was he saving that for when had dealt with everyone coming after him?

Immortality in general is a topic in the novel. How do you avoid getting bored, where do you find excitement when you don't age? Relying nanotechnology to provide eternal life in the previously peak-technology Chasm City got more difficult with the Melding Plague outbreak although aging was also fixed in ancient past already on a genetical level for some.

The second flashback strand are the memories of Sky Haussmann after whom Sky's Edge was named. Sky was crucified due to his actions against the colonists and a religious cult started worshipping him as a god. They developed a devious recruitment virus that gives its victim physical symptoms similar to Sky's and makes them relive parts of Sky's simulated life. Tanner gets infected by the said virus, though it is of a weaker strand.

Sky was the son of Titus Haussmann, the head of security aboard the Santiago, one of the ships in the first colony fleet, the Flotilla. Most of the colonists made the journey in cryosleep; the first generation of the crew would not see the destination due to the long travel time but their children would.

Sky's upbringing seemed odd, like how he had an AI teacher clown who then starts practically haunting Sky. He seemed traumatized to say the least. The Flotilla's journey is quite exciting thanks to Sky's questionable actions, though. And all of it does unexpectedly tie to the City as Tanner later discovers. Reynolds sure knew how to cast long reaching lines in this novel.

There's bit of a plot twist but novel hardly relies on it. It's not a shocking revelation that changes everything. I figured it out before the halfway point and stopped thinking about it until later when I realized there was another layer to it. It was a bit like my experience with Prelude to Foundation.

I read few negative reviews on GoodReads to see why people might have not liked Chasm City. I can't agree at all with the opinions that the novel was tedious to read. And any criticism towards Tanner's character kind of falls flat in the complete context of the novel. I suppose it does apply along the journey to a degree.

It seems that by having read the novel as a translation, I missed on stuff.

"Try anything and the only kind of composing you'll be doing is DE-composing!" [Said to a composer]

I find that a funny line (assuming it's a literal quote). I can see why that kind of dialogue would rub someone the wrong way, though. In Finnish, the pun wouldn't work and whatever the translation was, it didn't come across with quite the same comedic tone.

Another review also criticized the characters and dialogue, for instance how Tanner asks the sexy Zebra lady if she had always had zebra features. By that point Tanner should've been well aware how the Chasm City's elite and their interests worked to know that of course she hasn't been always like that. In fact, wasn't it indeed Tanner himself who had been telling the reader about the everliving folk's genetic alteration fashion? It felt like an odd and unnecessary question.

Despite its faults, though, Chasm City is an excellent novel. It has so many interesting concepts and themes, that it is worth a read even if it isn't a flawless execution.