Book 19: "Chasm City" by Alastair Reynolds
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 12:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeIt was worse than you are thinking. If the plague had only killed our machines, millions would still have died, but that would have been a manageable catastrophe, something from which we could have recovered. But the plague went beyond mere destruction, into a realm much closer to artistry, albeit an artistry of a uniquely perverted and sadistic kind. It caused our machines to evolve uncontrollably - out of our control, at least - seeking bizarre new symbioses. Our buildings turned into Gothic nightmares, trapping us before we could escape their lethal transfigurations. The machines in our cells, in our blood, in our heads, began to break their shackles - blurring into us corrupting living matter. we became glistening larval fusions of flesh and machine. When we buried the dead they kept growing, spreading together, fusing with the city's architecture.
It was a time of horror.
It is not yet over.
Most of the new arrivals to Yellowstone have been in cold storage for the voyage between the stars, so their knowledge of their destination is years or decades out of date. They expect to find themselves in the sophisticated society of Yellowstone’s belle époque, not knowing that Chasm City is in the grips of the Melding Plague, and that the once fabulous habitats in orbit around the planet have been so ravaged that the Glitter Band is now known as the Rust Belt.
Security consultant, assassin and ex-sniper Tanner Mirabel arrives in Chasm City from Sky's Edge on the trail of a murderer. After being infected by a virus created by a religious cult on his home world, he also finds scenes from the life of Sky Haussmann (the revered and reviled founder of Sky's Edge) playing out in his dreams. It's over 200 pages before Tanner actually makes it down to the surface of Yellowstone, having managed to get himself into plenty of trouble already, on a space elevator, in a hospice and in the shuttle down from orbit. From then onwards, the pace picks up as he finds himself in a warped landscape of mutated buildings, in danger from the low-life of the Mulch and game-playing aristocrats from up in the Canopy as he tries to track down his quarry.
From the start I found Tanner surprisingly unsuspicious and unobservant for a supposedly highly trained assassin, ex-sniper, bodyguard and security chief, and noticed a lot of inconsistencies in things people did and said. For once I was paying attention to all the clues and managed to work out what was going out before it was actually spelled out, although at one point I was misled by remembering how Dieterling had turned down the loan of Tanner's night-sight goggles before I got back on the right track.
The first couple of hundred pages did drag somewhat. but once I started to unravel the mystery of what exactly was going on, I got more involved in the story, but there were some things that still didn't really hang together properly. When I read about the ambush in which Tanner's boss was killed, I couldn't believe how unsuspicious Tanner and Cahuella were after finding the imposter in their midst. They knew that he could only have been made to look and behave so much like the real Rodriguez by the Ultras (off-world traders with a much higher technological level than the inhabitants of Sky's Edge), but they just assumed that it was probably a coincidence and that maybe the Ultras had not known that Reivich intended to use the imposter to kill Cahuella. For some reason, it didn't occur to them that if the Ultras were helping Reivich against Cahuella, maybe Reivich's group were not where the tracking devices said they were, and the Ultras might also have betrayed Cahuella's movements to Reivich. If it was me I would have broken camp and moved away as fast as possible, leaving any Ultra-supplied equipment behind so that no-one could use it to track me. But no, they just set guards as normal and everyone else went to bed, expecting that Reivich would walk into their ambush the next morning as planned! Whoever's point of view the reader was seeing these events from, this just doesn't make sense! Someone should have been more suspicious, definitely Tanner and more than likely Cahuella too. I was also unconvinced by the ease of Sky's sudden promotion to head of security and subsequent rise to Captain of the Santiago. Even though he managed to manipulate events to make other people appear to be guilty of his misdeeds, he was suspected, and mud sticks - especially when it happens more than once.
It was a time of horror.
It is not yet over.
Most of the new arrivals to Yellowstone have been in cold storage for the voyage between the stars, so their knowledge of their destination is years or decades out of date. They expect to find themselves in the sophisticated society of Yellowstone’s belle époque, not knowing that Chasm City is in the grips of the Melding Plague, and that the once fabulous habitats in orbit around the planet have been so ravaged that the Glitter Band is now known as the Rust Belt.
Security consultant, assassin and ex-sniper Tanner Mirabel arrives in Chasm City from Sky's Edge on the trail of a murderer. After being infected by a virus created by a religious cult on his home world, he also finds scenes from the life of Sky Haussmann (the revered and reviled founder of Sky's Edge) playing out in his dreams. It's over 200 pages before Tanner actually makes it down to the surface of Yellowstone, having managed to get himself into plenty of trouble already, on a space elevator, in a hospice and in the shuttle down from orbit. From then onwards, the pace picks up as he finds himself in a warped landscape of mutated buildings, in danger from the low-life of the Mulch and game-playing aristocrats from up in the Canopy as he tries to track down his quarry.
From the start I found Tanner surprisingly unsuspicious and unobservant for a supposedly highly trained assassin, ex-sniper, bodyguard and security chief, and noticed a lot of inconsistencies in things people did and said. For once I was paying attention to all the clues and managed to work out what was going out before it was actually spelled out, although at one point I was misled by remembering how Dieterling had turned down the loan of Tanner's night-sight goggles before I got back on the right track.
The first couple of hundred pages did drag somewhat. but once I started to unravel the mystery of what exactly was going on, I got more involved in the story, but there were some things that still didn't really hang together properly. When I read about the ambush in which Tanner's boss was killed, I couldn't believe how unsuspicious Tanner and Cahuella were after finding the imposter in their midst. They knew that he could only have been made to look and behave so much like the real Rodriguez by the Ultras (off-world traders with a much higher technological level than the inhabitants of Sky's Edge), but they just assumed that it was probably a coincidence and that maybe the Ultras had not known that Reivich intended to use the imposter to kill Cahuella. For some reason, it didn't occur to them that if the Ultras were helping Reivich against Cahuella, maybe Reivich's group were not where the tracking devices said they were, and the Ultras might also have betrayed Cahuella's movements to Reivich. If it was me I would have broken camp and moved away as fast as possible, leaving any Ultra-supplied equipment behind so that no-one could use it to track me. But no, they just set guards as normal and everyone else went to bed, expecting that Reivich would walk into their ambush the next morning as planned! Whoever's point of view the reader was seeing these events from, this just doesn't make sense! Someone should have been more suspicious, definitely Tanner and more than likely Cahuella too. I was also unconvinced by the ease of Sky's sudden promotion to head of security and subsequent rise to Captain of the Santiago. Even though he managed to manipulate events to make other people appear to be guilty of his misdeeds, he was suspected, and mud sticks - especially when it happens more than once.
