Lee's Reviews > Revelation Space

This was my second attempt at reading this book. My first ended about 150 pages in with complete confusion. My second attempt obviously saw me in a much better place to read it as I managed to get through the whole story.

I increase my rating from two to three stars. But really, it is a three and a half star book. I also had to create a new tag; epic science fiction, because I was originally going to use the Space Opera tag, but this is not opera, by any stretch of the imagination. I often thought that Hamilton could tell a massive sci fi story and have plenty of technology wrapping. Well Reynolds takes that sci fi and takes it way way up, often to heights that confuses you silly.

This book is 60% plot/story and 40% hard sci fi. I now know what 'hard sci fi' means. To me, it means moments of incomprehension and mind wandering. This hardness is what stops this from being a four star for me. There is, within the book, a fascinating story of epic proportion, that is fed to you slowly over time, interestingly the characters in the book begun to learn what the story is a long time before you do, so you feel blind at times as they go about trying to do what they need to do. I didn't mind that, it was different, a little frustrating, but had me wanting to know what was going on and I couldn't wait to find out. The problem is the incredibly detailed spacey stuff. Yes, yes, how untechnical of me. But I didn't want to read a book on astro physics. I love sci fi and warp speed if you can Scotty, but Reynolds really likes to explain not only the concept of new 'stuff', but the technology designed to make it happen, the theory behind the idea (so the hard sci fi fans can't claim it is ridiculous) and then how this 'stuff' warps time space skinny latte continuum. See, it was so technical I cannot even explain how technical it was.

So is that enough to put me off? The answer is no! Overall I was gripped enough by the story to want more. It was unusual to read a story with the potential to be so freakin huge and only have half a dozen characters. Being a Hamilton and Erikson fan, I am used to many many story arcs and hundreds of characters. In this, six will cover the characters and a couple of arcs all coming together, very cleverly.

There is massive potential in this epic and I do look forward to reading book two and understanding at least 60% of it.