Customer Reviews

The Prefect

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I've been a fan of Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" novels since I read the first, so my expectations for this book were high; so high I ordered it from Amazon.UK before it was available here in the US. I was not disappointed.

For anyone that has read and enjoyed any of the Revelation Space novels, this is a must read item. For anyone that has not read anything by Alastair Reynolds, this is an excellent choice to introduce you to his style and vision.

Set in the Glitter Band before the Melding Plague, this story really sheds a lot of light on what life could be like if humanity ever manages to get out colonize space as we follow a developing crisis as seen through the eyes of two main characters. It also fills in some explanations around Chasm City and the Rust Belt for those who have read the other Revelation Space books. The story is essentially a police detective story and the author throws the reader into the deep end immediately, creating and maintaining tension throughout.

I've always thought that Mr. Reynolds weaves an interesting tale, but this one surpasses the others by some margin in its inventiveness and interconnectedness of plot lines. I honestly could not put this down, and devoured it on a single business trip; breaking it open on the way out and having finished it before landing on my way home.

I highly recommend this, fan of Alastair Reynolds or not. This is great hard science fiction in the Space Opera genre.

Despite having published a string of heavyweight SF novels totalling thousands of pages, Alastair Reynolds is still experimenting. The tetralogy that made his name - Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark, and Absolution Gap - are huge, sprawling riots of technology populated by dozens of characters who are not always clearly delineated. They open a window on a masterfully depicted future universe whose sheer weight of high-tech detail leaves scant room for character development - in other words, classic hard SF of a kind to delight lovers of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Niven and the like. Then, in a departure that pleased some readers and infuriated others, Reynolds swerved into an original blend of hard SF and alternate-universe film noir with Century Rain, before returning to the world of spaceships, nanotechnology, AI, and aliens with Pushing Ice and Galactic North.

In "The Prefect", he modulates perceptibly towards the detective genre, while bowing in the direction of the Tom Clancy school of war novelists and dropping in a little quiet horror that Stephen King would be proud of. The result is a much pacier, focused book with a clear and straightforward plot - although Reynolds still gives us a plentiful dose of technological thrills on the side.

"The Prefect" is set in the Yellowstone system, shortly after the events described in "Revelation Space". The system contains three contrasting human societies, which trade with each other at arm's length: Chasm City, the only major human outpost on the planet Yellowstone; the Parking Swarm, where the spacegoing Ultras dock their vast lighthugger starships; and the Glitter band, a variegated "asteroid belt" of 10,000 human habitats. Each habitat is self-contained and self-governed, with powers of life and death over its citizens. That leaves the Prefects, based on their orbiting citadel Panoply, with little to do except regulate the automated voting system through which all Glitter Band citizens continually express their will. Unless authorized by a vote, for instance, the Prefects are not even allowed heavy weaponry - although the "whiphounds" they carry are not to be trifled with.

Tom Dreyfus, the prefect of the title, is an experienced field operative nearing retirement age. Years ago, he was involved in the disastrous episode of the Clockmaker, a malign artificial intelligence that had to be destroyed after it suddenly began killing people in hideously creative ways, but whose evil legacy still persists. Starting with an apparently routine investigation into voting fraud, Dreyfus and his team find themselves confronted by a rapidly escalating series of threats. No matter what they do, they always seem to be a step behind their unseen adversaries, who might be anyone from scheming habitat owners to Ultra crews, the alien-seeming Conjoiner "spiders" with their group mentality, or even a mysterious software entity hiding somewhere in the Glitter band's network. As the story develops, it seems that no one can be trusted.

Compared to most of Reynolds' previous novels, "The Prefect" rates higher for unputdownability and dramatic tension. On the other hand, it is rather less panoramic and introduces fewer technical innovations - if only because most of them have already appeared in other books. There is some inconsistency in the handling of technology - perhaps the worst example being when a senior Ultra requests blood dialysis because "My ship's having trouble purging my fatigue poisons. I think the filters need changing..." That's 20th century technology in an era when computers can hold conscious representations of human beings in storage, and nanotech "medichines" swarm through bodies, fixing or rebuilding them from inside.

Small flaws like this notwithstanding, I think "The Prefect" is Reynolds' best book so far in terms of focused excitement. Purists may dislike the compromises this entails, but it should reach a wider audience than his previous work.

The Prefect is a detective story set in the Revelation Space universe. Readers unfamiliar with the setting are well advised to read the earlier novels first as familiarity with Mr. Reynolds past work is presumed. That said, the story involves entirely new characters and the events of the earlier novels don't have much bearing on the plot.
The Prefect is set in the Glitter Band, home of 10,000 self contained communities. The prefects are ostensibly the police force of the Glitter band but are more appropriately protecct and maintain the voting apparatus that serves as the collective government. When one of the communities is destroyed, apparently in retaliation for spurning a deal proferred by an Ultra ship, the investigation leads to conspiracies involving fellow prefects and shadowy artificial intelligences.
The Prefect is an entertaining and fast paced detective story. Where it falls flat is in giving away too many of the secrets early on. While I enjoyed the book, many parts seemed rushed and the characters were not given enough opportunity to develop.
Overall, fans of the prior Revelation Space books should enjoy this, while new readers should start with the earlier books.

Three out of five stars means I liked this book more than I disliked it, but I would hesitate to recommend it to others because it has a few serious flaws:

- Characters making irrational and sometimes downright stupid decisions just to advance the plot
- Technology that oscillates between numinous and downright disappointing (Reynolds can't decide on any one level of technological sophistication, often with even a single item, like the whiphound that can be alternately devastating or utterly useless, again merely to advance the plot)
- Plot is revealed through expositional dialogue that is, to put it simply, a real stretch. People jump from one crazy assumption to another and treat each conjecture as the truth. This grated on me because these plot points were often contrived and seemed to slot together in that neat way that defies common sense but is obviously essential to the plot.

This book is less rigorous than what I'd expect from an accomplished sci-fi writer. With someone like Iain Banks, you get a cohesiveness that leaves you feeling whole and fulfilled long after you put the book down.

I enjoyed reading The Prefect, but afterwards it felt cheap, like an airplane novel. I've still ordered Revelation Space because reviews say it's qualitatively different from his later books.

EDIT: After reading Revelation Space, Reynolds has progressed as a writer with the Prefect: Revelation Space is terribly written. Just awful. It feels like the manuscript never saw the hands of an editor and was instead sent straight to the presses replete with bloated prose, jarring structure and typos so bad they make you do a double-take.

As far as I can tell, this story is set after the departure of Dan Sylveste for Delta Pavonis but before the onset of the Melding Plague.

Some Spoilers follow, consider reading this book before reading my review.

It is a mystery/suspense story following the efforts of 1 main character and a couple of supports to unravel a large conspiracy directed at taking control of the Glitter Band. Given the context of demarchist democracy, he offers a much more in-depth view of the orbiting communities of Yellowstone than we have gotten anywhere else, including in Chasm City. Significant reference is made to material, events, and persons in previous books, particularly Revelation Space. Several character revelations and developments were not obviously telegraphed but are credible when looked at in retrospect, a somewhat-hard thing to do for many authors.

I only had a single quibble but I am going to wait until it is published in the US to write that here, as presumably 99% of readers of this review haven't read the book.

I am a big fan of Alastair Reynolds, he is one of the greatest SF writers of our time. Unfortunately, he drops the ball big time with The Prefect.

What I really like in most of AR's work, that the stories are believable, there are no contrived plot elements just to increase the tension. Everything is logical and makes sense. Well, in this book this is not the case at all.

Characters do not do the sensible and obvious things in the book. Not just once, but major plot elements feel totally unrealistic. In the book there is nano-technology enabling people to conjure up furniture at will. There is also a system-wide computer network connecting everyone. Yet, investigators do not have recording equipment, interrogations are performed without recording and witnesses, prisoners are not under constant surveillance (in one case not even guarded), spaceships do not have tracking devices and can just get lost. There are also obvious solutions to some problems that are not even considered in the book.

IT DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE.

I only read the book because it reveals some interesting things about events that are present in the other book of the series.

Alastair Reynolds' THE PREFECT opens with a small crisis in the Glitter Band, an agglomeration of thousands of habitats orbiting planet Yellowstone. Several hundred people have been killed in the destruction of the Ruskin-Sartorious habitat, and the evidence points to Ultra traders bearing a grudge. Field Prefect Dreyfus, however, has his doubts. Dreyfus is an archetypal good cop, a veteran who'll never get ahead because he's too outspoken, too honest, and too conscientious. The more he pokes his nose into the Ruskin-Sartorious case, the more tangled and mysterious it becomes. Soon, he and his resourceful team find themselves rushing to unravel and foil a plot that threatens to take away the freedoms -- and possibly the lives -- of millions of citizens across the Glitter Band.

While a gripping read, THE PREFECT is a below-par effort for Reynolds. It doesn't have the scope, depth, or audacity of Reynolds' earlier CHASM CITY, with which it shares the setting of Yellowstone and the Epsilon Eradani system. There are lots of plot holes (why would the bad guy(s) choose to do that when something far easier would probably have been effective?), a lot goes unexplained, and a question that appears at first to be central (is democracy really better than benign dictatorship?) turns out to be a red herring.

The novel is nonetheless of interest to fans of the REVELATION SPACE universe, revisiting familiar places like the Glitter Band, familiar themes like the nature of consciousness and self-awareness, familiar groups like the cyborgified Ultras with their enormous Lighthugger ships, and familiar people like Phillip Lascaille, the first man to survive contact with the alien Shrouders. It also introduces some new tech, of which the whiphound -- a semisentient combination of snake, whip, light sabre, and grenade -- is definitely the coolest. All in all, it's not a bad package.

If you haven't yet read REVELATION SPACE and CHASM CITY, you can probably read THE PREFECT without being very confused, but DON'T. Read the earlier novels first. If you've read and enjoyed the earlier novels, definitely DO pick up THE PREFECT.

I'm a huge fan of what is referred to as space opera and this is not it. I find Reynolds completely unimaginative. His technology is primitive and boring, his plot, even with all the twists, only mildly curious (I'm not even going to bother to finish this one but I did manage to get to the end of "house of suns" and it was a total wash). There are no redeeming qualities to his stories - no description of life in the future, cardboard characters with no depth. And seriously - manual updates of software still??? Dont waste your time on this guy. If you want a real space opera with an interesting society and imaginative technology try Peter F Hamilton or Ian M Banks.

For me, Reynolds has been an up and down author. He is talented to be sure, and I have read all his books. There have been a few disappointments, especially with his endings and dialog, but I have to say The Prefect was VERY GOOD overall, with some of that sci-fi noir I have come to love about Reynolds.

The Glitter Band setting in this book was terrific. I really enjoyed hearing about all the various cultures in each "habitat" and the up close description of some of their characters when Thalia had to go visit.

For the most part, this was a thrilling page turner with the right mixture of futuristic sci-fi and great characterizations. Also, the dialog was MUCH improved in this book compared to some of his others. It's still not "literature", but much better (dialog is my #1 gripe about any sci-fi book).

The only part that got bogged down for me was when the book kept going back to Thalia and her citizen friends throwing junk down the elevator shaft at the crazy robots. I actually skipped over these sections one I detected the pattern. So a decent chunk of that could have been written out.

Otherwise, great story, terrific sci-fi visions, some thrilling noir (although I would still like a little more), and not a bad ending either, although it was highly predictable. All very nice and tidy, with an open end that keeps you wondering (Clockmaker vs. Aurora).

I have to say I honestly didn't enjoy this one as much as I did the others that came before. That isn't to say I didn't like this book but I felt the others had more of a draw for me than this one did. I really enjoyed the pre-plague setting though and it was good to have a few unanswered questions answered. I always enjoy his writing and I devour his books. I'm looking forward to the next one.