History Literature / RevelationSpaceSeries

* MainliningTheMonster: In ''Chasm City'', an alien marooned on Yellowstone is the only source of a drug that can suppress the [[BodyHorror melding plague]].

** The Inhibitors have a range of techniques and designs for [[ApocalypseHow dealing with troublesome interstellar species]]. [[spoiler:They used one such trick to generate a lethal solar flare and destroy the civilisation on Resurgam. When the inhibitors noticed a ''new'' civilisation there, they decided to turn it UpToEleven and construct a "Star Singer": a gigantic and continuous solar flare that reduces the surface of the inner worlds around the star to slag and substantially reduces the star's mass, turning it into a red dwarf.]]

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: You bet ! And due to the author's love of AnyoneCanDie, the only character from the trilogy still alive by its end is [[spoiler:Ana Khouri]].

* HordeOfAlienLocusts: [[spoiler:The Greenfly.]] They become the BiggerBad after the [[spoiler:Inhibitors]] are defeated. Despite being just [[spoiler:out-of-control terraforming devices]], for some reason they're even more unstoppable than the machines specifically built to exterminate advanced civilizations. DiabolusExMachina, anyone ?

A [[MohsScaleOfSciFiHardness Hard Sci-Fi]] SpaceOpera series by Welsh author Creator/AlastairReynolds, where 26th century humans have achieved advanced nanotechnology and slower-than-light interstellar travel and find themselves needing to discover why [[AbsentAliens all the other intelligent species they find evidence of seem to have gone mysteriously extinct]].

* AbusivePrecursors: And ''how''. But it's [[PlayingWithATrope played with]], as the survival of humanity [[spoiler:really ''DID'' eventually doom the universe]].
* Though, ironically [[spoiler:This, in and of itself, renders the original purpose of the Inhibitors pointless; the Milky Way is rendered uninhabitable and evacuated ''long'' before the collision with the Andromeda Galaxy they were trying to corral all sapient life to single star systems to more easily minimize the damage of.]]

* SpaceDoesNotWorkThatWay: Averted all the way. Related to the ShownTheirWork entry.

* ''Inhibitor Phase'' (2021) - A novel supplementary to the main trilogy (chronologically set between the final chapter and epilogue of ''Absolution Gap'') giving more detail about the human-[[spoiler:Inhibitor]] war, in particular how humanity obtained access to [[spoiler: Nestbuilder]] weaponary.

** ''Literature/ThePrefect'' has been turned into the first book of a trilogy with the third book projected for 2019. Given that the first two are set in the pre-Melding Plague golden age Glitter Band with things just starting to go mysteriously wrong, anyone who has read the chronologically later books will know what’s coming (in general terms; presumably the point is to give the details of how the plague started).

* ''Absolution Gap'' (2003) - The third nnovel of the main trilogy.

* HuntingTheMostDangerousGame: Shadowplay, in which the bored, virtually immortal residents of Chasm City accept to hunted for thrills by professional assassins according to pre-agreed rules. The game is set up so most of the clients survive, in order for people to keep paying for the thrill-seeking experience.

* HuntingTheMostDangerousGame: Shadowplay, in which the bored, virtually immortal residents of Chasm City are hunted by professional assassins according to pre-agreed rules. The game is set up so most of the clients survive, in order that people will keep paying for the thrill-seeking experience.

* RealityEnsues: Pretty much the reason why AppliedPhlebotinum is not always an instant solution to everything. The series is generally very down to earth in what humans can achieve even with highly advanced or reverse-engineered alien tech. For instance, Khouri's entire previous life gets wrecked because of a bureaucratic mistake that puts her and her husband on two different lighthuggers. Since CasualInterstellarTravel is non-existant in the series and crossing from one system to the other can take decades (even in reefersleep), her chances of meeting him again during her lifetime have dropped to nearly zero.

* SinisterGeometry: The Inhibitors appear as aggregates of variously-sized, self-replicating black cubes, but these are explained as something like force fields surrounding the actual Inhibitor machines, which disintegrate into dust when destroyed.

* FriendlyPlayfulDolphin: {{Subverted|Trope}} in ''Chasm City''. The first of the Sky Haussman flashback episode introduces you to children Sky and Constanza who evade their parents' oversight to go visit the dolphins who are kept in the spaceship they live in. That looks very cute and slightly cliché... until you meet the dolphins, who after being used as experimental subjects by a radical transhumanist group and then kept and bred in captivity for centuries, have turned sadistic and totally psychotic.

* GreatOffscreenWar: The first war between the Conjoiners and baseline humanity, on Mars, is this for most of the series. We do see a small bit of it in ''Galactic North'' though.

* HopelessWar: War with the Inhibitors is definitely seemed like this trope to humanity and the countless alien species wiped by the Inhibitors previously. [[spoiler:Later, Humanity defeated them offscreen with the help of the [[HigherTechSpecies Nestbuilders]]. But accidentally they created more powerful threat in the form of the [[OmnicidalManiac Greenfly]]. And war with the Greenfly became [[DownerEnding truly hopeless]]]].
* HordeOfAlienLocusts: [[spoiler:The Greenfly.]] They become the BiggerBad after the [[spoiler:Inhibitors]] are defeated. DiabolusExMachina, anyone ?

* MechanicalAbomination: Inhibitors are definitely qualified like this. They are so advanced that humans barely able to grasp how their technology works.

* TheMilkyWayIsTheOnlyWay: Played straight in the main novels - the scarcity of [[ReactionlessDrive Conjoiner Drives]] and the limitations of light speed have limited human expansion to a roughly 100 light year wide bubble around Earth. Even the Inhibitors - a "race" of robots that [[AbsoluteXenophobe purge starfaring life]] and think within the [[TimeAbyss timespan of billions of years]] - have their operations limited to the Milky Way. Averted in the DistantFinale novellas with the [[spoiler: release of the Greenfly terraformers]]; humanity begins to flee wholesale from the Milky Way to escape.

* BaseOnWheels: The "cathedrals" and "caravans" of Hela's [[FantasticReligiousWeirdness strange local chuches]] from ''Absolution Gap''. Though some of them are actually built like giant {{Spider Tank}}s, including the first and greatest, Quaiche's ''[[MeaningfulName Lady Morwenna]]''.

* ''Absolution Gap'' (2003) - The third novel of the main trilogy.

* NighInvulnerability: The Inhibitors are almost invincible. The only weapons able to hurt them are "[[ImportedAlienPhlebotinum hypometric weapons]]" that work by essentially ''erasing'' volumes of spacetime from existence (including any Inhibitor machinery), and the Conjoiner's forbidden "[[LostTechnology Cache Weapons]]" that are strong enough to blow a hole in the moon.

* UpliftedAnimal: The hyperpigs and hyperprimates.

** It doesn't end there: Reynolds is a self-confessed fan of 70s and 80s music, and it shows... A gas giant in the same system as Yellowstone (Epsilon Eridani) is called [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_Dream Tangerine Dream]]. Pre-Plague Yellowstone's ring of orbital habitats is called [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitter_Band The Glitter Band]]. And the very name of the [[StarfishAlien Pattern Jugglers]] may be a reference to a verse from Music/KingCrimson's well-known song ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53q2YuKGejc In The Court Of The Crimson King.]]''

* BadassGrandpa / CoolOldGuy: Nevil Clavain all the way. Dan Sylveste also has his moments. Scorpio matures into one during the main trilogy.

Concerning suggested reading order, the suggestions vary depending on who you ask. Though it's a safe bet to start with the anthology ''Galactic North'' and the novel ''Chasm City'', as these introduce much of the details and themes of the setting and its societies (and thus give a good feel of the scope of the whole setting). Reynolds himself [https://web.archive.org/web/20120204050334/http://www.alastairreynolds.com/id17.html has stated] (in an older version of his official website) that the novels of the main trilogy should be read in their order of publications, while the novel ''Chasm City'' and the two main anthologies of shorter fiction can be read at any point, before the trilogy (as prequels of a sort), or even after.

The series, in the usual suggested reading order, includes:

* ''Galactic North'' (2006) - A collection of short fiction set at various points in the Revelation Space future history. While standalone, the stories have links to other stories, including the initial trilogy. The short stories are ''Great Wall of Mars'', ''Glacial'', ''A Spy in Europa'', ''Weather'', ''Dilation Sleep'', ''Grafenwalder's Bestiary'', ''Nightingale'' and ''Galactic North''. The anthology also includes a detailed Afterword by Reynolds, where he talks about his writing influences and his personal approach to the series and its future history.

Shorter fiction, including newer short stories created and published after

* ''Literature/DiamondDogs, Turquoise Days'' (2003) - A collection consisting of a pair of novellas unrelated to the main storyline, but set within the same universe.

* ''Literature/ThePrefect'' (retitled ''Aurora Rising'') (2007) - A prequel to ''Chasm City'', set before the Melding Plague. A sequel,''Elysium Fire'' (2018), has appeared, with a third book to follow.
* ''Galactic North'' (2006) - A collection of short fiction set at various points in the Revelation Space future history. While standalone, the stories have links to other stories, including the initial trilogy.

* TragicBigot: A captain in ''Galactic North'' hates Conjoiners because they converted, then supposedly killed, his wife. After it turns out that she lived, and left a message for him in the collective mind about how much she would always love him, his attitude improves a little.