Reynolds, a working astrophysicist and one of the new British space-opera writers who, as Ken MacLeod puts it, "respect the science", isn't going to fob you off with a lot of old Warp Factor Six. Also enabled is a bravura display of effects looted from every interesting branch of contemporary science - quantum technology, emergence theory and cosmology. Their efforts draw in a large cast of semi-human assassins, hard-up space pilots and dead people from the future. The Conjoiners, desperate to protect their hive mind, prepare to abandon the galaxy, leaving more ordinary humans to take their chances Ilia and Ana, heroines of Revelation Space, watch the Inhibitors carelessly dismantle a gas giant for building materials, and decide to fight. Out of this multilayered embroilment emerges the story of mankind's continuing response to the threat of Inhibition. Every communication is from the future, or the past, or from a space coincident with the one we classically inhabit. Everyone's mind has been invaded by someone - or something - else. Every time a new character steps through a doorway, the plot refolds. But what has this to do with the "hyperpig" Mr Pink? And who is H, with his force of inertia-less pirate ships? What secret knowledge did Skade the Conjoiner take away from Chasm City, many years before? How does any of this fit with the arrival of the Inhibitors, machines devised a billion years ago to control - by pruning - the development of intelligent life in the galaxy? The more we learn, the less we know. Meanwhile, the sentient weapons onboard Nostalgia for Infinity, the lighthugger at the centre of events in Revelation Space, turn out to be Conjoiner lost property, manufactured hundreds of years before in response to a half-perceived threat.
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