Absolution Gap

Absolution Gap is a direct sequel to Redemption Ark in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space. It has some amazingly imaginative elements and the story seemed to get truly wild after it got going. But it didn't last all the way until to the end: central characters were written off in lame ways and the narrative fizzled out. Multiverse stuff gets worse in Gap: always too convenient a tool to explain stuff -- anything can happen.

I wasn't paying attention to the year numbers at the start of chapters and I thought the novel's different events were happening concurrently. I realized my error when the planet of one narrative was mentioned in another. That was also when I largely figured out what was going on -- and that was pretty early into the novel.

I had forgotten how extreme Ultranauts can go with their transhumanism because after the first novel, all the featured Ultras in the novels and short stories have been pretty standard humans. In Gap, their weirdness makes a full return. Quiache is not an Ultra but he does serve on a lighthugger, the Gnostic Ascension. He's also carrying a religious indoctrination virus -- similar to that in Chasm City. Quiache's been able to resist it but later it becomes a fundamental part of his character.

Quiache's job is to find something the ship's demanding captain, Queen Jasmina could profit from. He finally does so when he's sent to an unexplored planetary system of the star 107 Piscium. The system has a gas giant (he dubs Haldora) on whose moon (Hela) he discovers a structure of unknown origin -- a sort of a bridge over a large chasm (dubbed later as the eponymous Absolution Gap) -- maybe built by another species wiped out by the Inhibitors. Quiache's exploration trip almost ends up badly but he also discovers something more.

After that, Quiache's narrative jumps decades ahead in time. The book skips how he managed to escape his precarious position under Jasmina; later simply summarizing the happenings which I think would have been worth telling properly. Maybe the novel was getting too long. It's not even the only skip in Gap.

Another important viewpoint in the later Hela era is of a young woman, Rashmika Els. She lives in a backwater place, not being interested in the local mining operations, rather wanting to research Scuttlers, an extinct species whose remains have been found on the moon. She starts a journey to join the line of Cathedrals that slowly crawl around Hela, always keeping Haldora in view on the sky as the moon slowly rotates around its axis. It is quite a unique story backdrop, the whole church Quiache has built. The icy Hela doesn't even have an atmosphere yet the countless pilgrims have given the moon a sizeable population.

Ararat is where the lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity ended up at the end of Ark, carrying the survivors of Resurgam, evacuated before the Inhibitors destroyed the Delta Pavonis system. Ararat is yet another Pattern Juggler ocean planet. It's not a great place for so many people: not much land to live on. The Nostalgia and her Plague-Melded Captain Barrigan also landed on the planet -- and that is a cool picture to imagine: kilometers-long spacecraft, partially submerged in an ocean. You'd think a spaceship built for interstellar travel in vacuum would have trouble making planetfall into an atmosphere but apparently it's not an issue at all. The ship was designed for 1 g acceleration, thus vertically, with its engines pointing down, it's completely fine. However, it is a mystery if the ship will ever be able to take off again after spending years in the Pattern Juggler waters.

The survivors were not meant to stay forever on Ararat: they're waiting for the Conjoiner ship Zodiacal Light to arrive from Delta Pavonis. Its crew, including Remontoire and Ana Khouri, stayed behind to attempt consulting the binary partner of Delta Pavonis, a weird-ass neutron star Hades Matrix (featured briefly in RS and Ark): if it would give humanity a way to fight the Inhibitors. They estimated it would take 20 years for them to catch up to Ararat. That time is well past in this book but finally things start to happen: a Conjoiner escape pod has landed on the planet with an unknown person inside.

Once out the pod, the person briefs everyone on the late happenings what seemed to me like enough stuff for a whole novel. I reckon Reynolds could have easily fit another book between Ark and Gap.

It's conflicting how the Inhibitor threat is the big problem but they're not really present in Gap aside from few cool battles -- the characters are kind of fighting the machines indirectly with the Hela-Haldora arc. The Inhibitors are not communicated with nor their "thoughts" visited this time. There's no reason for that; their purpose was made clear in Ark already: they want to inhibit sapient species from spreading all over. It got really Mass Effect 3 (the other way around really, considering the release dates) but unlike the Reapers, the Inhibitors are not "saving" sapient life just from itself but from the Milky Way - Andromeda collision. It will be easier to save all the life when it exists on fewer planets and systems.

Coincidentally, just a couple of months ago, I read that according to new simulations, the galaxies may not actually be colliding. Not that it matters for anyone currently living but I guess that plot point didn't age too well for the Revelation Space series.

Absolution Gap seemed to have finished this Inhibitor Sequence in 2003. However, 18 years later, in 2021, Reynolds returned to it with Inhibitor Phase. I wonder what it's about; when does it take place? But before that, I reckon I'll read some other Reynolds books.

I read Absolution Gap in Finnish -- translation by Hannu Tervaharju, as always. There weren't really weird words this time, aside from 'geenipooli' (gene pool). I've never seen that before. 'Geeni' is a common word but I guess some scientific circles wanted a new word for pool, the usual translations maybe not being abstract enough. It does look a bit lazy, though.

Edited 2024-11-26: Typo fixed and clarified language.