Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days & Galactic North

With some exceptions, it doesn't matter that much when you read the novella/short story collections of Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and Galactic North in relation to the rest of Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series -- at least to the Inhibitor Sequence: I have not yet started on the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies. However, I would say the best place to read them is probably after Revelation Space and Chasm City, before Redemption Ark, with the exception of the eponymous Galactic North story which I would leave after Absolution Gap. It might hit the same when read right before that novel too.

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Diamond Dogs is sort of a weird heist story using the RS setting. In Chasm City, the protagonist Richard Swift meets his old, presumed-dead friend Roland Childe who is assembling a team to investigate an alien structure on a distant planet Golgotha. Other members of the team include Richard's Pattern-Juggled ex-wife Celestine, hacker Hirz, Dr Trintignant, and Forqueray the Ultranaut captain of the lighthugger Apollyon.

The alien structure is dubbed Blood Spire, which is an ominous name yet accurate. It's like a hardcore Mensa test that punishes harshly for incorrect solutions, each chamber being more difficult. Along the journey, the team discovers Childe has not been completely honest but what they don't discover is the purpose of the Spire or what it's hiding. Dr Trintigant appears later in a story in Galactic North.

Turquoise Days features one of the galaxy's many ocean planets inhabited by the Pattern Jugglers. The Jugglers are not quite a sentient lifeform or at least communicating with them appears impossible. Somehow they have spread around the galaxy though, to break the molecules of beings entering their waters and sometimes returning them back all juggled up. The novella's focus is on the Pattern Jugglers but it doesn't come any closer to explaining them than any other story in the universe I've read so far.

Galactic North

The anthology begins with two short stories that feature Nevil Glavain: The Great Wall of Mars and Glacial. The former story is referred to multiple times in Redemption Ark -- which always mildly annoyed me. Having read the novel first, the short story doesn't offer much new. Glacial is more of a random scifi story you tend to find in an anthology, just happening to feature Glavain as the protagonist.

A Spy in Europa felt barely connected to the RS universe, another anthology piece. I guess that was due to the homely Solar System being so far from Resurgam and Chasm City. The Great Wall has at least Glavain and the Conjoiners to connect it to the universe.

Weather was my favorite story in the collection. It features a similar interstellar chase sequence to Redemption Ark and a good look at the Conjoiners. There's also a big revelation on how the lighthuggers work.

Dilation Sleep is another disconnected anthology story. It was originally published 10 years before Revelation and it shows. It is clear Reynolds had not yet developed the universe as much: stuff like lexicon used doesn't quite match the later works. In the afterword of Galactic North, Reynolds does talk about such challenges of writing future history. He also mentions his sources of influence -- I recognized only one or two of the authors mentioned.

In Grafenwalder's Bestiary we're back in Yellowstone and Chasm City some time after the Melding Plague. Grafenwalder is one of the rich people, collecting rare specimen to pass his never-ending time. In addition to City, the story connects to Diamond Dogs and A Spy in Europa.

Nightingale is another heist story, oddly enough -- and is odd itself likewise as well. The civil war on Sky's Edge has halted in a ceasefire. A man called Tomas Martinez has prosecuted interrogator Tillman Kessler and is now after Kessler's once-boss Colonel Brandon Jax. Martinez recruits the protagonist Dexia Scarrow, a soldier in the war, for the team to find Jax. Other members of the team include Martinez's slow-witted bodyguard Norbert, security bypasser Ingrid Sollis, and reefersleep-extraction expert Salvatore Nicolosi.

Jax turns out to be hiding on a neutral, AI-controlled medical spacecraft called Nightingale that was thought to have been destroyed in the war. Many of Reynolds's short stories, if not the majority -- and his full-size novels, too -- have dark twists, often involving body horror of some kind, Nightingale probably taking the crown of being the most horrific of them all. I suppose that with trans- and posthumanism that is to be expected: humanity taking different forms. But I think that Reynolds purposefully makes it as abominable as possible.

The titular Galactic North story ties to Absolution Gap. If you read the short story before the novel, I predict you will experience a feeling of recognition in Gap. The other way around will give you an explanation on how things came to be (though it is hardly necessary for understanding anything; more of a nice to know thing). The short story keeps jumping ahead of time with huge leaps; it feels like an outline for a novel that never got written.

I loved the 'burial at c' pun. I find it awesome that an old maritime tradition gets a bonus wordplay on lighthuggers chasing the speed of light. The character requesting it does however note that the pun doesn't work in the language they speak. I read the book in English (no Finnish translation): now I wonder how Hannu Tervaharju would have struggled to translate it. I guess it would have actually been better in non-English, the pun not working like it didn't for the characters.