Have you ever read for so long that your shoulder seizes up, and you have to stretch, but you do it one arm at a time so you can keep reading with your other hand? That happened to me while reading Chasm City. Even physical pain could not make me put this book down- I was getting to work half awake from my late nights with this one, and hanging out for my lunch breaks so I could race through a few more pages.

While the rest of the Revelation Space series deals with big ticket narrative items- One existential threat to human existence, please! – Chasm City is smaller scale, and is comprised of two separate narratives. The first follows a security operative, Tanner Mirabel, as he hunts a fugitive through what was once humanity’s greatest and most advanced civilisation, now reduced to a tangled, twisted slum by a disease that preys on nanotechnology. The second is centered several hundred years prior on a group of slow colony ships spending decades in deep space on their way to a new world, and one of their crewmembers, a young man named Sky Haussmann. Between Tanner and Hausmann Reynolds sketches a vivid and brutal future, and a surprising story of revenge, betrayal and the consequences of relentless ambition.

Reynolds briskly flogs the story along, never letting up the tension, or slackening the flow of brilliant ideas. He works from a fairly hard-SF mindset, so most of the tech in Chasm City is pretty plausible, ranging from nanotech ‘medichines’ in people’s blood to gigantic sub-light ships that take decades to cross the expanses between stars.

I loved this book. I thought about it for days after I had read it, and my memories of its stand-out scenes still send shivers up my sci-fi loving spine. Chasm City is, in my opinion, a near perfect work of SF, melding the brilliant ideas and faraway worlds SF does so well with a strong narrative and sharp prose style that the genre sometimes lacks.

Reynolds has written some really good stuff, but for this reader Chasm City is his dark and atmospheric crown, the high water mark of a deep and rewarding body of work.

This is space opera at its most operatic, and Reynolds hits (and holds) all the high notes.