After our recent revisit to the re-released first book in this series, here’s the latest release in this future detective story.
This one’s an unexpected surprise. Back in 2007 I reviewed The Prefect HERE (now renamed Aurora Rising) with the hope that I would read more from the same setting. Over ten years later we return to the worlds of the Glitter Band, patrolled by the Panoply police force. It’s a magnificent humdinger of a sequel.
For many readers the good news is that these novels fit into Alastair’s grand scheme of Revelation Space, a Future History of rise and fall, ambition and decay, in the finest traditions of Iain M Banks’ Culture or even Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. In Alastair’s setting, these novels are prequels, happening before the events that are in his novels like Chasm City. The Melding Plague catastrophe that will befall the thousands of orbital habitats grouped together as The Glitter Band has not yet happened, although there are intriguing little snippets throughout these books that things are not going to end well.
In Elysium Fire it is now two years after the Aurora Event (told in Aurora Rising). The characters we met in the first book return, older and wiser and still defending law and order when needs be. Deputy Tom Dreyfus is back as a Chief Prefect (detective), his boss, Supreme Prefect Jane Aumonier, and Dreyfus’s fellow officers to whom he is a mentor, Thalia Ng & a genetically enhanced ‘hyper pig’ Sparver Bancal.
Elysium Fire begins with a series of sudden deaths amongst the Glitter Band citizens. There seems to be no pattern and no motive. None of the victims seem to be connected and they are all from different walks of life and different habitats. Dreyfus and his team are brought into this situation when Thalia is asked to retrieve one of the victim’s bodies. Dreyfus is told that this is not the first and there has been nearly fifty deaths so far. Worryingly, the incidents, referred to as “Wildfire”, are on the increase, with the time between each death shortening. Panoply has to try and determine cause and motive before the problem spreads across the Glitter Band and also stop it happening further.
As you can see, things have moved on since The Prefect, and not entirely for the better. The ‘Aurora Event’, and the way it was handled by Panoply, has led to a growing unease between the citizens and the law enforcement agency. We are seeing unrest across the Band, which Dreyfus and his team struggle to maintain control over. One of the most outspoken critics of Panoply is Devon Garlin, an evangelistic orator whose path keeps crossing with Dreyfus as he travels to different habitats. Dreyfus is convinced that Devon has something to do with Wildfire but cannot pin him down to anything specific.
Much of the novel is about this but there are subplots. One is about two twins, Caleb and Julius, whose mysterious upbringing has implications for the old families of the Band and will no doubt be connected to future events. We also have the return of Aurora, whose involvement in events is never simple.
This is being touted as a stand-alone novel. I am sure that it can be, but I appreciated re-reading Aurora Rising first. (In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I did something I rarely do these days and read two books in a series back-to-back.) This rereading showed me that with Elysium Fire how much Alastair has grown as a writer in the last decade. The characters here have grown in depth and complexity since The Prefect, and consequently our need to ‘see them right’ has grown with it. They are more fleshed out, more conflicted…. more human. As before, the setting is a wonderful conceit, all the more so when long-time readers know that eventually things will not be what they are here.
Elysium Fire hits the ground running and slowly and cleverly connects what seem to be disparate aspects of the novel. By the end the issues of the book resolve themselves and set things up nicely for future stories.
When I reviewed The Prefect I did say I would hope that there would be more in this series. Elysium Fire shows that it was right to return to this universe and that there is potential for more stories in Revelation Space. I hope that it’ll not be ten years.
Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds
Published by Gollancz, January 2018
326 pages
ISBN: 978-0575090583
Review by Mark Yon
Before reading Alastair Reynolds’ ELYSIUM FIRE I first read the short story “Open and Shut”(available free online here: https://www.gollancz.co.uk/2018/01/open-shut-short-story-alastair-reynolds/) and then the novel THE PREFECT to prepare for this new book. It is billed as a stand-alone novel but our understanding and enjoyment are greatly enriched by reading these two prequels. However, I think that the attempt to make ELYSIUM FIRE a stand-alone novel by incorporating numerous info-dumps to explain to the first-time reader material that was acquired more contextually in THE PREFECT actually weakened it. Most of the necessary world building was done in THE PREFECT, so the sense of wonder, so ably conveyed by Reynolds, is diminished if one has read the first volume, which managed to combine harmoniously both wonder and intrigue. The sequel is much more explanatory than THE PREFECT. If the stylistic ideal for fiction is show, don’t tell, in this second volume we have more telling, less showing, and the harmonious balance is lost. ELYSIUM FIRE is an enthralling novel that makes one want to race through the book and to finish it in as few sittings as possible. It comes close to, but does not fully match, the balance of speculative invention and suspense-filled intrigue that made the first book such a successful fusion of sf and detective genres.