Revenger

by Alastair Reynolds

ISBN: 978-0-575-09054-5

First published 2016

425 pages

Cover design & illustration: blacksheep-uk.com

3/5 Stars

This is a great rip-roaring space yarn. The concepts introduced here are mind-boggling and truly awesome. However, although it doesn’t say on the cover – it is a young adult book and reads as such.

The story is written from the point of view of a 17 year old girl, Arafura. She with her sister Adrana, flee their home on a small planet, and make off with space scavengers, on the hunt for wealth and fortune.

The author writes in a style similar to Terry Brooks (of ‘Shannara’ fame), with cliff-hangers at the end of each chapter, and plot twists and turns aplenty.

The failure of the 3rd chapter, ‘Mazarile’, (there are only 4 chapters in total) to engage with the reader, or indeed to add any substance to the plot marks the book down.

Characters are well drawn out but the central two characters, Arafura herself, remain distant and there is no real empathy created in the reader for them.

It is the space concepts, though, that are worth reading, the list below is only some of them:

• Baubles – Planets protected by shields, that only open every decade or so for a short window of time (enough for scavengers to attempt to extract their wealth)
• Ghosties– Guns and armour that are invisible to the naked eye
• The Occupation – The galaxy has been colonised many times before, and each colonisation or ‘occupation’ builds on the last. The story is set in the Thirteenth Occupation.
• Lookstone – Solid material that if you squeeze allows the viewer to view outside of consecutive barriers beyond them. The harder you squeeze the more you can see.
• CatchCloth – Similar to sun sails, but instead of catching photons and allowing the ship to be driven by the solar wind, this cloth catches other, dark particles
  (neutrinos, I suggest).