Revenger by Alistair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is famous primarily for his galaxy spanning high technology science fiction. His worlds and stories buttressed by complex and fascinating ideas about space, physics and the possibilities of technology. In his latest book Revenger, he has taken those elements and done something as unexpected as it is wonderful. He’s written a book about space pirates! Not just a book with bad guys with spaceships, but proper pirates, devil-may-care freebooters sailing the solar winds in ships centuries old with crews closer than kin. Revenger is set in a wrecked area of space. The planets were shattered aeons ago, and humanity lives on the thousands of city or country-sized chunks that remain. Still others live in one of the thousands of spindle like habitats left behind by the many waves of intelligent races that have previously occupied the region. Moving between them are the endless criss-crossing of ion-drive ships and the solar-sailed Sunjammers. The bravest of these are the ones who scavenge for pieces of lost tech in abandoned places and wait for ancient shields and protections to fall on planetoids and stations whose inhabitants are now lost even to memory. The key to the success for these individuals lies with the Bonereaders, rare individuals who can link with ancient alien skulls that not only facilitate communication across space, but also feed information about which shields are about to fall and where. It is a ship like this that two sisters find themselves on after fleeing their home city. Both bonereaders, they are both beginning to find a place in the crew when they are attacked by another ship. What transpires sends the sisters on wildly divergent courses and is the start of a tale of pursuit and revenge that is the stuff of legend.

As I said earlier, this is basically a science fiction pirate story. But it’s masterfully done and is one of the best adventure stories I’ve read in a while. It’s under four hundred pages, but I think that it speaks to Reynolds skill as a writer that in addition to getting a rollicking story, you’re also getting a totally new science fictional universe. I loved this book and really hope that he intends to do more.