Notes on 'Chasm City' (2001) by Alastair Reynolds (b. 1966)
Alastair Reynolds belongs to a new generation of critically acclaimed authors who will still engage with space opera but who have tended to take down a notch the epic scope that characterised the resurgence of space opera in the 1980s. Set in the 26th Century, Chasm City, the second book in Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space series (2000-2003), but taking place before the the events of Revelation Space (2000), adopts the Cyberpunk trope of mind uploads to explore shifting layers of identity. The series chronicles humanity’s disparate effort to colonise space, threatened by the Melding Plague and a mysterious, advanced machine civilisation known as the Inhibitors. It won the British Science Fiction Award for best novel (2001).