Literature / Revelation Space Series

aka: Chasm City

A Hard Sci-Fi Space Opera series by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds, where 26th century humans have achieved advanced nanotechnology and slower-than-light interstellar travel and find themselves needing to discover why all the other intelligent species they find evidence of seem to have gone mysteriously extinct.

The series, in publication order, includes:

• Revelation Space (2000) - The first novel in the main trilogy.
• Chasm City (2001) - A stand-alone novel set before Revelation Space.
• Redemption Ark (2002) - The second novel of the main trilogy.
• Absolution Gap (2003) - The third novel of the main trilogy.
• Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003) - A pair of eponymous novellas unrelated to the main storyline, but set within the same universe.
• 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.
• The Prefect (retitled Aurora Rising) (2007) - The first Prefect Dreyfus Emergency novel. Takes place a century before Chasm City when Yellowstone's civilization is at its pre-Melding Plague height.
• Elysium Fire (2018), a sequel to Aurora Rising and the second Prefect Dreyfus Emergency novel.
• Newer short stories in the setting, created and published since Galactic North, can be found in the anthologies Deep Navigation, Beyond the Aquila Rift (Reynolds-only stories, mixed content) and Infinite Stars (Reynolds' contribution was a short story from the setting).
• 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-Inhibitor war, in particular how humanity obtained access to Nestbuilder weapons.
• Machine Vendetta (2024) - The third in the Prefect Dreyfus Emergency series.

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 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.

Warning: The series contains convoluted Plot Twists and reveals. The majority of spoilers are marked but read at your own risk if you have not read the series!

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The Revelation Space series provides examples of:

• Absolute Xenophobe: The Inhibitors, though they are Wicked Cultured and Affably Evil on the rare occassion when they make direct contact with humanity.
• Abusive Precursors: And how. But it's played with, as the survival of humanity really DID eventually doom the universe.^note Though, ironically 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.
• Action Girl: Ilia Volyova, Ana Khouri. Often seen as Back-to-Back Badasses. Scorpio's old friend Orca Cruz is pretty badass as well.
• Aerith and Bob: Names range from common (Ilia, Boris, Nevil, Dan, Tom, John, Pascale, Nils, Martin) to less common (Ana, Xavier, Antoinette, Carine, Renzo, Lyle), to downright rare (Schuyler, Galiana, Tanner) or odd (particularly among Conjoiners: Skade, Remontoire, Felka, Aura etc.). And then there are the wilder examples (Scorpio, Lasher, Blood, Beast), used mostly by the hyperpigs or self-aware AIs with a sense of humour. Although Ilia is usually a male first name (though unisex), which makes it more Aerith than Bob.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • While the Inhibitors never actually stray from their mission of containing spacefaring life, depending on whose narration you trust they may have either started to question themselves near the end or started to become even more traditionally evil, drifting from using minimal force to simply killing for the sake of it.
  • Also the insane hospital ship in Nightingale and the galaxy-eating Greenfly robots from Absolution Gap and Galactic North.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: A major plot point in Absolution Gap is the mysterious bridge above the eponymous chasm on Hela, considered to be an artefact of the extinct Scuttlers. This gets subverted at the end of the novel, when we learn that the bridge actually is a human-built structure, created by a maniac Skyjack artist a few centuries ago.
• Alien Geometries:
  • The Inhibitor "jewel" in Revelation Space, and later the weapons humanity is forced to adopt against the Inhibitors.
  • Possibly the later stages of Blood Spire in Diamond Dogs, too.
• Alien Sea: Planets which are inhabited by Pattern Jugglers usually have most of the surface covered by oceans. Their water contains numerous microscopic organisms that give the water an unusual color and density.
• Ambiguously Brown: Ana Khouri. Though concerning her roots on Sky's Edge and her given name, she probably has South American ancestry. (The surname is her husband's, who is of Middle Eastern descent.)
• Anachronic Order: Omnipresent, as Reynolds rigorously obeys the constraints of relativistic time-dilation.
• And I Must Scream:
  • The Melding Plague. It's totally harmless if you're a baseline human, but if you have any replicating nanotech in you, it will infect it and cause it to rapidly fail and go out of control. In Chasm City, a character mentions that if you have those implants in your head, your head will explode. And it can infect advanced buildings and vehicles as well. In Chasm City, inhabitants of high-tech buildings were trapped in the walls, visibly screaming in terror. The survivors of the disaster don't know if it's possible to revive them.
  • Don't let H catch you in the act of police brutality, especially if you're already a Brain in a Jar.
• Antimatter: Antimatter weapons are small, hard to get, and extremely destructive; one character has one bomb implanted in his eyes (the eyes are artificial) and could destroy a kilometre long spacecraft with a thought. Small projectile weapons firing shielded antimatter fragments are also known, but seldom used outside of serious conflicts between very well equipped parties.
• Apes in Space: Hyperprimates are some of the uplifted Earth creatures in the setting, including orangutans, silverback gorillas and gibbons, and many of them live and work in the Glitter Band (and later Rust Belt) in Yellowstone orbit. Harming them is apparently a major crime, and they supposedly have really strong trade unions !
• Apocalypse How:
  • Whenever the Inhibitors detect a starfaring species, they trigger an apocalypse of Species Extinction severity on all its planets. If that fails, they can step up as far as a Physical Annihilation one. At the end of the series, we know the greenfly infestation will eventually take over the whole universe, ergo a Universal scope.
  • Also, attempting superluminary travel has been known, according to the Inhibitors, to delete entire civilizations from the timeline.
• Artificial Gravity: Human ships create gravity by acceleration or spinning. But Grubs have completely mastered gravity manipulation and can create artificial gravity without acceleration or spinning.
• Asteroid Miners: The Skyjacks. Transhuman cyborg spacers with detachable limbs and a surprising affinity for industrial-themed arts.
• Augmented Reality: The advanced human societies use entoptics. Entoptics are a technology that consists of various visual layers interpolated into human sight at some point between the viewer's cornea and visual cortex.
• Badass Normal: A lot of the main characters, but Volyova probably takes the cake: MacGyvering ? Check. Batman Gambits ? Check. Deadpan Snarker ? Check. Smoking Is Cool ? Double check.
• Badass Longcoat: Ana Khouri wears one while on a Shadowplay assasination assignment in Chasm City. They're also popular on Sky's Edge, where she was born.
• Base on Wheels: The "cathedrals" and "caravans" of Hela's strange local chuches from Absolution Gap. Though some of them are actually built like giant Spider Tanks, including the first and greatest, Quaiche's Lady Morwenna. The cathedrals don't move very fast, around a kilometer per hour, but they do it so that they're always beneath the holy gas giant Haldora (Hela rotates very slowly).
• BFG: The Breitenbach cannon, a portable particle beam weapon similar to a light machine gun. But since the series deliberately isn't built around gun fights and actiony scenes, it makes only brief appearances.
• Big Dumb Object: Oodles of them, virtually in every Reynold's work. And particularly in this series. Often overlaps with Forgotten Superweapon, Lost Superweapon or Lost Technology.
• Bio Punk: The Mixmasters sect and various people attempting genetic modification.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: We don't get to see many of the aliens, but the long-extinct Scuttlers appear to have been able to freely mix and match their limbs. It's speculated that they evolved in the equivalent of a crowded lobster tank, where it was advantageous not only to be able to drop a limb for a predator to grab, but to take it back if the predator doesn't eat it—or to grab someone else's that's been dropped.
• Black Box: Main characters use various alien technology, acquired by various means, without even knowing how this technology works.
• Body Horror:
  • The Melding Plague.
  • And the eventual fate of Colonel Jax and the protagonists in the short story Nightingale.
• Boring, but Practical: Spaceflight and space warfare in the series in general. Although the weapons and spacecraft involved are immensely powerful, they still have to deal with the immense distances and timeframes of sub-lightspeed interstellar travel, taking years (at the very least) to travel between stars.
• Boy Meets Girl: A more adult version with Inigo and Weather in the short story Weather. Mostly platonic between the two leads, though there is certainly a lot of gentle tension between them. Borders on a transhumanist version of an Interspecies Romance, with Inigo an almost entirely unmodified Ultra and Weather being a Conjoiner. For such a frequently gritty and often dark setting as the Revelation Space universe, you do get the occassional down-to-earth, non-sugarcoated, but heartwarming love story (that also works as a story on its own).
• Blast Out: Averted most of the time. The only bigger shoot outs occur at the end of Revelation Space and Absolution Gap and in some parts of Chasm City. Most of the action scenes avoid gunfights altogether.
  • Played straight in Inhibitor Phase in the escape from the Swinehouse.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • The author himself has claimed that the ending to Galactic North, with the remnants of humanity fleeing the galaxy from the Greenfly is "quite optimistic, in my book". Specifically, he compares that ending to past crises humanity has faced in real life. His perspective on the looming encapsulation of the universe is optimistic because there's still some time "...before things reach a crisis point again. And humanity will survive that, as well..."
  • All encountered alien species, many AI's, and even many instances of Transhumanity encountered display some level of Bizarre Alien Psychology. The Jumper Clowns for instance seem to be morally offended by the concept of faster than light travel- though in light of later events this becomes quite a bit more understandable. The Inhibitors in particular are mainly problematic due to thinking on a timescale insanely longer than most sentient races, and an unusual idea of what constitutes "helping"...
• Brain Uploading: In the Revelation Space universe, behavioral simulations of people are common and full neural simulations also exist; there's also a neutron star that acts as a giant computer and uploads the neural patterns of anyone who gets close enough to it that its gravitational stresses will kill them.
• Burial in Space: One standard way to inter bodies is to accelerate in a spaceship until you're traveling as close to the speed of light as you get, then shoot the body out in front of the ship. This is referred to as "burial at c".
• Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie: Antoinette Bax and her father in Redemption Ark.
• Butt-Monkey / Cosmic Plaything: A lot of the main characters have to undergo struggles with physical pain, mental stress or just plain old bad luck and bad timing (leading to various misunderstandings). Clavain, Khouri, Scorpio, Quaiche, Brannigan and Volyova all qualify. And the list goes on.
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: In developed systems like Sol and Yellowstone, planetary travel is fairly cheap.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Averted. It takes decades to get between stars, and even getting a ride on a Lighthugger is rare outside of the core planets like Yellowstone. Border worlds may have a Lighthugger drop by only after a couple decades.
• Chekhov's Gun / Chekhov's Skill: Lots and lots in each installment of the series.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder / We ARE Struggling Together: The original crew of the Nostalgia for Infinity.
• Colonized Solar System: Mars was colonized by the augmented Conjoiners and Europa was colonized by the democratic anarchists. The Conjoiners fled the system after the Coalition for Neural Purity attacked them and the Demarchists moved their operations to the Epsilon Eridani system. The Solar System was dethroned as the hub of human civilization when Earth underwent a second ice age, and by the time most of the stories take place it is a backwater in comparison to Epsilon Eridani.
• Colony Drop: In Absolution Gap, Ararat is devastated when its moon gets blown up during a battle against the Inhibitors. Earlier, they destroyed Resurgam by turning its sun into a giant flamethrower.
• Cool Star Ship: The Nostalgia For Infinity, Zodiacal Light and Nightshade in the Revelation Space trilogy. Heck, any starship◊ in the series, given how rare and hard to produce they are. The picture behind the link is Reynold's official lighthugger schematics.
  • Inhibitor Phase has the Scythe, a Melding Plague immune stealth lighthugger incorporating the most advanced human and alien tech Glass has been able to discover.
• Consummate Liar: Aura/Rashmika Els in Absolution Gap - as a Living Lie Detector, she can always tell if someone is lying to her, and mostly tells the truth because she tends to assume everyone else can do the same. But when she's called on to do it, she succeeds like nobody's business because she knows every possible tell and avoids them all.
• Continuity Porn: A lot of the backstories of the major characters from the trilogy are explored in the standalone novels and it's often really interesting how many seemingly forgetable details from works set chronologically earlier become important plot elements later on. Also, expect many an Early-Bird Cameo in the standalones of the series (e. g. Khouri in Chasm City, though she's an Anonymous Ringer there).
• Continuity Snarl: Reynolds, in his afterword to Inhibitor Phase, acknowledges that some of the dates of events in that novel are inconsistent with those in Galactic North. He suggests this can be resolved by assuming that Irravel in Galactic North either had her dates wrong or had stopped taking time dilation effects into account for the purposes of her journal.
• Crystal Spires and Togas: Chasm City, before the Melding Plague ruined everything.
• Cult Colony: Population of moon Hela from Absolution Gap profess weird religion founded by Horris Quiache.
• Culture Chop Suey:
  • A given, with humanity being quite a cosmopolitan mix during the events of the trilogy, especially on old and densely inhabited colony worlds like Yellowstone. Nationalities play a far lesser role than back on Earth and the main new political and social divisions are purely idelogical factions (such as the Conjoiners, the Demarchists, the Ultranauts, etc.). Some characters' names give obvious hints about a great mixing of nationalities (e.g. Pauline Sukhoi, Xavier Liu, Gillian Sluka). The Demarchist language is said to be "Canasian", a fusion of Chinese and Quebecois French.
  • Yellowstone is a cosmopolitan mix of a planet, settled mostly by American, European and East Asian colonists. Sky's Edge was settled by Latin American, Middle Eastern and Pakistani/Punjabi nationalities. The most interesting inhabitants are those of Turquoise, descended from people with Inuit and Thai ancestry.
• Cyborg:
  • A lot of the future factions of humanity have transhumanist trappings and are usually cyborg-lite, with various brain implants. The Conjoiners are a whole society of these, while the Ultras and Demarchists often have some simpler body implants as well.
  • A more straightforward example of this trope would be captain Brannigan from Revelation Space before he became consumed by the Melding Plague. Also, Skade from Redemption Ark, who has herself willingly tranformed into one after a near-fatal accident.
  • Doctor Trintignant from Diamond Dogs is absolutely obsessed with cyborgifying anyone he can get his hands on, including himself. Badly injured people are a great opportunity for him. Reynolds highlights this with this some snarky Black Comedy quips from the "good doctor" himself.
• Cyborg Helmsman: The crews of interstellar spacecraft have formed their own culture, and most of them are cyborgs. A more extreme example is John Brannigan, a starship captain who became infected with a nanotechnological virus, causing his mind and body to merge with his ship in a very disturbing way. Even before the virus, he is described as being more robot than man, with the only visible trace of his humanity being his dreadlocks and the skin around his highly modified face.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Averted in most of Reynolds' novels, but played with in Diamond Dogs. Although in fairness, in that novella it's more along the lines of "Modifying the fundamental structure that underlies your cognitive processes may have deleterious effects on your personality"; a similar thought is explored in another book with Skade, who temporarily disables her vomit reflex while working in space to prevent the disparity between her visual and inner-ear sensory inputs from convincing her brain that she's been poisoned and triggering emesis, i.e., making her puke her guts up. She notes to herself that because the brain is messy and holographic, even small changes like this have decidedly peculiar knock-on effects on perception and cognition.
• Dangerous Device Disposal Debacle: the Hell Weapons were buried in an asteroid so that no one would ever find them unless they went looking for them. Cue an Ultra captain with an interest in archeology and the history of the human diaspora overhearing a tavern legend.
• Death by Origin Story: Calvin Sylveste and, to an extent, Carine Lefevre. Khouri's ill-fated first husband, Fazil (though by the end of Absolution Gap, it's implied that he's Back from the Dead). Yay.
• Death World: The All Planets Are Earth-Like trope gets a major kick in the shins in this series. The most Earth-like planet mentioned is Sky's Edge, which is full of hostile life that is biologically incompatible with Earth life. Eating it will kill you (and vice versa, but the local predators haven't figured this out and will happily eat you - yes, they will die almost instantly, but that's hardly likely to be a comfort to you) or, possibly, do nothing. Then there are the Pattern Jugglers - algae-like Starfish Aliens inhabiting planets with global oceans - that usually act benign, but once in a while someone who swims with them doesn't come back, comes back wrong, or worse. Also, Yellowstone, the most important and most populated interstellar colony of humanity, has an atmosphere and surface very similar to Saturn's moon Titan, so only the giant domed settlements (like Chasm City or Loreanville) and orbital habitats are actually populated. Pretty much all planets in the series are either uninhabitable, barely habitable (without advanced tech) or habitable, but full of Everything Trying to Kill You.
• Death from Above: Threatened by Volyova in Revelation Space, who uses one of her ship's smallest weapons to devastating effect as a warning to the inhabitants of Resurgam. She also has access to teratonne-yield nukes and "hell class" weapons that could conceivably shatter worlds (and indeed do, on one occasion).
• Deconstruction: A hard sci-fi decon of the Space Opera subgenre, with some liberal applying of Reconstruction here and there. For a start, there's no Casual Interstellar Travel at all and the author goes to great lenghts to examine the ramifications of this simple fact on the setting and personal fates of the characters (Khouri's tale being a prime example). The classic scifi trope of faster-than-light travel is only actually attempted once in the series, and it destroys the ship trying to use it.
• Defector from Decadence: Nevil Clavain. He defected twice in his life: First in The Great Wall of Mars, when he joined the Conjoiners after he had learned the Coalition for Neural Purityhad lied about their nature and only wanted to destroy them. Then, centuries later (during the events of Redemption Ark), he defected from the Conjoiners once a younger and far more radical inner faction (led by Skade) had taken over and wanted to leave the rest of humanity defenceless against the Inhibitors, instead of offering help.
• Description Porn: Reynolds loves this. It occasionally veers into near-Purple Prose territory.
• Detonation Moon: In a battle against the Inhibitors in Absolution Gap the Conjoiners accidentally blow a hole in one of Ararat's moons by using one of the cache weapons.
• Deus ex Machina:
  • The ending of Revelation Space does this in the case of the fate of three of the main characters. Though it's at least explained thouroughly.
  • At the end of Absolution Gap, when it is revealed that the Inhibitors were defeated with the assistance of a mysterious alien race which had been hiding behind the scenes all along.
    • Inhibitor Phase gives more detail of how the human-Nestbuilder alliance came about which suggests the point of view character in the prologue and epilogue of Absolution Gap was unaware of, or had forgotten, the truth. It was not a willing alliance on the Nestbuilders’ side. Humanity stole their tech and is implied to have blackmailed them to get off the fence by threatening to reveal what the Slugs had done to the original Nestbuilders.
• Distant Finale: The last chapter in Absolution Gap ends with the Greenfly terraformers eating up entire solar systems and surrounding them with jungle habitats, slowly converting the entire universe into uninhabitable, green stars. Humanity ultimately evolves into godlike machines, but still can't defeat the Greenfly.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Thorn (as a Bus Crash) and Felka between Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Also, Antoinette and Xavier in Absolution Gap.
• Downer Ending: The epilogue of Absolution Gap suggests that there will be no happy ever afters for anyone, ever again.
• Earth All Along: Looks like the "Shadows" are humanity in the far future, after the Diabolus ex Machina of the epilogue curbstomps the universe with nanotech. The brane allowed them to contact their past, yet they didn't think to warn us about the greenfly, did they? Where's the Melding Plague when you really need it? Alternatively, why didn't Exordium warn anyone? Though they did try the Melding Plague. It didn't work...
• Eldritch Abomination: Many of the more enigmatic aliens have shades of this, but the Shadows are a shining example of this trope in its purest form.
• Electronic Eyes: Dan Sylveste. They're made using local parts on Resurgam, which means they're really terrible. His eyes break from a flashbang like device, and then can only see greens.
• Emergency Transformation: In the short story The Great Wall of Mars, one character joined the Conjoiners to survive a life-or-death situation. Later, it gets payed forward when a comatose Volyova is given a medichine infusion despite her phobia of them in Redemption Ark.
• Eternal English:
  • Averted. Though the stories are all in English via Translation Convention, it is clearly stated that human languages 500 years in the future have continued to further evolve. Notable examples are the two main lingua francas: Norte and Can-asian. In a throwaway comment, Volyova refers to her native language as "Russish", not "Russian".
  • Even lampshaded: During Galactic North, there is a request for a burial at C (shooting the casket forward while just before decelerating), "An old joke that only worked in a long forgotten language."
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Quaiche's tragically deceased lover Morwenna. Though bear in mind that Quaiche himself is more of an Anti-Villain.
• Exact Words: In "Nightingale," the hospital ship Nightingale tells the narrator that she and her compatriots can leave "in one piece" after they've seen and retrieved Colonel Jax. Unfortunately, what the ship means is that the entire group will be surgically melded together into a single, monstrous whole.
• The Faceless: The shipmaster Queen Jasmina of the lighthugger Gnostic Ascension hides her true appearance by using the remote controlled clone bodies.
• Fantastic Religious Weirdness:
  • Revelation Space and Chasm City show a new, monastic-esque faith - the Ice Mendicants - whose clergy and members are dedicated to protecting, helping or healing people who've awakened from reefersleep after an interstellar journey (particularly those who were less lucky). They're sort of like the original version of The Knights Hospitallers during The Crusades, before they became more of a Warrior Monk order. Also, they're one of the few new religions that are closer to Saintly Church rather than Corrupt Church.
  • Also, as seen in Chasm City the various religious cults that sprang up on Sky's Edge after the life, deeds and supposed death of the colony's controversial founder, Sky Hausmann, passed into legend. Some of the more avid cults even went so far as to engineer special biomechanic nanoviruses to forcefully indoctrinate unsuspecting people or opponents into new followers of their faith. This becomes a major Chekhov's Gun in the Backstory of Horris Quaiche from Absolution Gap (who founds his own bizarro religion, based on a mishmash of old Earth faiths and his own traumatic experiences enhanced by the virus). Absolution Gap generally goes far deeper into this trope, often to the point of Deconstruction and subsequent Reconstruction.
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • Yellowstonian Demarchists call Conjoiners "spiders" and rogue Demarchists, Skyjacks and Ultras "zombies". The "spider" nickname was also used by the Coalition for Neural Purity seen in the chronologically earliest installments of the series. Conjoiners refer to baseline humans as "the retarded".
  • In-Series Nickname: The Yellowstonians (and apparently people from other terrestrial planets as well) often refer to themselves as "Stoners".
  • Soldiers on Sky's Edge are referred to as "Whiteeyes", due to the distinctive tan-lines left by their HUD monocles.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Theoretically possible, but very, very risky, hence the preference for the far more restrictive slower than light travel used by humanity. Skade and her crew try to break the light barrier in Redemption Ark thanks to some alien Applied Phlebotinum upgrades built into Nightshade. It doesn't end well...
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • The Scrimshaw Suit used by one of the ship's captains in Absolution Gap. You can't move and have no external sensory stimulous. It gets attached to the front of the ship and buried under tonnes of ice used to shield the ship from dust collisions when going at near light speed for the subjective years that interstellar travel takes. And it won't let you die. Or sleep.
  • What H does to a violent and abusive police officer in Redemption Ark is related. In order to control the robot through which he does his police work, the policeman is already little more than a Brain in a Jar plugged into a life support system. His punishment is to just be stored somewhere and remain plugged into said life support system without any external stimulus, until his death.
• Fish People: Denizens are an engineered sentient species created on Europa by mixing human and fish genes.
• Flying Car: The volantors of pre-plague Chasm City. Some examples appear directly in the opening chapter of Diamond Dogs.
• Foregone Conclusion: Anyone who read "Galactic North," published between the first and second novels of the main trilogy, will know that Humanity eventually defeats the Inhibitors "at least for now" with the help of the Nestbuilders, only to later be all but wiped out by the Greenfly.
  • The Prefect has been turned into the first book of a trilogy with the third book to come. 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).
• Forgotten Superweapon: The first Revelation Space novel features Powered Armor suits that are never mentioned in later books, though there are several stituations in which they would make a huge difference. Then again, they would likely have been destroyed/corrupted when the Melding Plague / The Captain took over the ship; this is plausible, since they also appear in Diamond Dogs, which is mostly set in the pre-Plague era.
  • They return in Inhibitor Phase, by which point at least some factions have found a countermeasure to the plague.
• For the Evulz: Averted by most villainous characters, but played straight by the infamous dictator of the planet Haven, mentioned in Turquoise Days.
• Friendly, Playful Dolphin: Subverted 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. Note that Sky and Constanza are completely aware of this.
• Future Slang: Hoo boy ! Reefersleep, entoptics, slush puppies, volantors, brezgatniks, Ultras, Stoners... And the list goes on.
• Future Imperfect:
  • Antoinette Bax mentions that the first astronaut was named Neil Gagarin.
  • Also, several other characters make various comments about Earth history, with varying degrees of accuracy.
• Genius Loci: The Nostalgia for Infinity from the main trilogy, after the Captain's intelligence is spread throughout its systems by the Melding Plague. Also, many enviroments overtaken by the Melding Plague in general. A more unrelated example of this trope is Blood Spire in Diamond Dogs.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Horris Quaiche's Backstory in Absolution Gap concerns his firm slip into depression and insanity after the woman he loved died by accident while he managed to survive and get rescued . This is not helped at all by the fact that he's got a special nano virus implanted into his body. It serves to pacify him via indoctrination by presenting hallucinations showing random religious imagery from Earth's history. And it always goes off in situations where he becomes overloaded by grief, anger or other negative emotions. So take a wild guess what happens to him once he finds out about the death of his significant other.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: The names of the various spacecraft. Seriously: The Pelican in Impiety, Storm Bird, Faint Memory of Hokusai, etc.
• Grand Theft Me:
  • What the Captain did to Sajaki prior to the events of Revelation Space.
  • Also played straight and subverted by Calvin Sylveste, who had originally engineered Dan Sylveste as a clone of himself to make it easier to possibly imprint a copy of himself into Dan's brain. While he does do this near the end of the book (and already did it once), it's more of a two people/one body relationship.
  • In Chasm City this is inverted. Cahuella overwrites himself with Tanner's personality in order to dodge his enemies, though this may qualify as more of a Memory Gambit gone wrong, as he gets better, more or less.
  • In Inhibitor Phase the Slugs are revealed to have done this to the Nestbuilders at a species level.
• Gratuitous Russian: Volyova, but only when she gets particularly frustrated or angry (so it's mostly limited to swear words or snarky comments), and with fairly bad Russian grammar at that (she doesn't seem to differentiate between singular and plural forms of her favourite cussword). It is mentioned, however, that her language, "Russish", is not the same as modern Russian (it's actually a hybrid of Russian and English).
• Great Offscreen War:
  • The Dawn War, in which all the first spacefaring civilizations in the galaxy fought each other over metal, which was rare in the early universe. This event led directly to the birth of the Inhibitors.
  • 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.
• The Great Wall: In the short story "Great Wall of Mars", the wall is built to hold in an Earth-like atmosphere on a small but expanding area of Mars.
• Great White Hunter: The hamadryad hunters on Sky's Edge.
• Gun Porn: The Warchive aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, which can reproduce any weapon from recorded human history. Volyova and Khouri make good use of it at the end of Revelation Space, when they need to arm themselves. Then they destroy it, just in case the attacking force takes control of the entire ship.
• Hopeless War: War with the Inhibitors is definitely seemed like this trope to humanity and the countless alien species wiped by the Inhibitors previously. Later, Humanity defeated them offscreen with the help of the Nestbuilders. But accidentally they allowed a more powerful threat to rise in the form of the Greenfly. And war with the Greenfly became truly hopeless.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Greenfly. They become the new villain after the Inhibitors are defeated. Despite being just out-of-control terraforming devices, for some reason they're even more unstoppable than the machines specifically built to exterminate advanced civilizations. Diabolus ex Machina, anyone ?
• Human Popsicle: Most starship passengers, as it's either cryo or spend years or decades awake between stars.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Shadowplay, in which the bored, virtually immortal residents of Chasm City accept to be 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.
• I Have Many Names: Schuyler "Sky" Haussmann, aka Cahuella, then "Tanner Mirabel" (after stealing his memories), then just "H". And since he was one of the momios on the Generation Ship Santiago, Sky Haussman is not even his birth name.
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: Rashmika doesn't lie, because she's a Living Lie Detector and assumes everyone else is too.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Earth is only mentioned a handful of times and none of the characters ever go there. Much of the plot takes place around the planet Yellowstone.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • "Servitors" for robots (non-sentient worker ones, but still).
  • What is this "cryogenics" you speak of? It's called "reefersleep", dammit! And flying cars are "volantors", get it?
• Intelligent Gerbil: Some of the less out-there alien species. A subversion, since they're few and far between and by the time starfaring humans discover them, they're usually already extinct.
  • The Amarantin were an advanced humanoid avian species from the planet later known as Resurgam, a formerly Earth-like world orbiting Delta Pavonis. The reasons behind their disapperance and the planet turning to a barely habitable rocky wasteland drive the central mystery in Revelation Space.
  • Implied to be the original biological form of individual Inhibitors Their former outward appearance was seemingly canine-like, gaining them the nickname "wolves" among humans.
• Interfaith Smoothie: Horris Quaiche from Absolution Gap and the religions founded by him after he goes mad from grief and the influence of the indoctrination virus.
• Invisible Aliens: the handful of species humanity encounters are found to do this to avoid attracting the Inhibitors.
• It Has Been an Honor: Antoinette Bax's ship subpersona i.e. ship computer representation Beast is at some time revealed to be an alpha-level (meaning scanned) version of a criminal called Lyle Merrick. Towards the end of Redemption Ark, end of Chapter 39, Lyle says to Bax: "It was a pleasure to serve under you. A pleasure and an honour."
• Jerkass: Dan Sylveste.
• Legendary Carp: In "Chasm City", research involving carp produced the earliest immortality treatments. As a result, the postmortal upper class reveres carp in general, and there is also a specific carp which is also several hundred years old and therefore extra-revered.
• Little Hero, Big War: To the point that in Absolution Gap, humanity largely isn't saved by their own efforts at all, but by the abovementioned Invisible Aliens deciding that the Inhibitors have finally become weak enough for them to reveal themselves and fight them. This is revealed in passing in the epilogue - not so much part of the story as just an incidental fact of how history played out—but see the note after Deus ex Machina above for an alternate view on that point.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Clavain for Felka.
• Living Lie Detector: Aura/Rashmika Els.
• Longevity Treatment: This type of treatment is commonplace in highly advanced societies. Unfortunately, the Melding Plague ruined many societies by throwing their technology back in time. For example, on Yellowstone this kind of therapy became available only for the rich, and its application also became quite dangerous because of the Melding Plague.
  • It also plays an important part of the plot in Chasm City, where Sky Haussmann became one of the first people treated in infancy with the unique longevity treatment that stops the aging on reaching adulthood.
• Man in the Machine: Disembodied brains in Conjoiner drives.
• Meaningful Name: In-universe, Cahuella.
• Meanwhile, in the Future…: A given, with all the Time Dilation and Anachronic Order going on. A big part of the plot for the first third of Revelation Space and Absolution Gap.
• Mechanical Abomination: Inhibitors are definitely qualified like this. They are so advanced that humans barely able to grasp how their technology works, and are so ancient that they've Seen It All and already know how to counter every new weapon or strategy humanity uses to fight them.
• Memory Gambit: Tanner Mirabel/Cahuella in Chasm City, and Aura in Absolution Gap.
• Mercurial Base: The theocratic society on the ice moon of Hela relies on travelling Cathedrals, which keep pace with the moon's rotation not for environmental but for religious reasons: to keep the vanishing gas giant within sight of their zealots.
• The Milky Way Is the Only Way: Played straight in the main novels - the scarcity of 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 purge starfaring life and think within the timespan of billions of years - have their operations limited to the Milky Way. Averted in the Distant Finale novellas with the release of the Greenfly terraformers; humanity begins to flee wholesale from the Milky Way to escape, knowing that there's nowhere they can run that it won't eventually arrive at.
• Mind Virus: Features in some of the novels. Chasm City has a virus that gives it's victims dreams of a cult leader's messiah, along with slowly altering their thoughts until they are believers.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Doctor Trintignant from Diamond Dogs, Grelier from Absolution Gap.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Grelier is surprisingly loyal to Quaiche, even after he learns about what he had planned and done.
• Mysterious Antarctica / Grim Up North: Resurgam from Revelation Space and the moon Hela from Absolution Gap are a sci-fi variation of this. Diadem from the short story Glacial starts out with a characterization like this, but it gets subverted at the end.
• Multinational Team: Virtually all of the human factions of the series' setting got their start this way, already in the era of Solar System colonisation, before manned interstellar colonisation was practically developed. By the time of interstellar colonisation, most of the established factions of the universe had no allegiance whatsoever to old Earth nations and governments and formed their own societies and polities in deep space and on new colonies. All these developments contributed to the Culture Chop Suey nature of many of the societies, and the high frequency of multi-ethnic names.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "The Inhibitors", "the Shadows", "the Melding Plague" (as well as "the Uncontained" from Pushing Ice). Oh, and did I mention "Hell-class weapons" ?
• Naming Your Colony World:
  • Symbolica: Torquoise, Spindrift, Haven, Diadem, Sky's Edge, Resurgam (Latin for "I will rise again")
  • Mnemosyme: Hades, Cerberus (Greek mythology), Hela, Haldora (Norse mythology), Roc (giant bird from Persian/Oriental mythology), Zion, Ararat, Golgotha (Biblical), Fand (Irish mythology)
  • Named The Same: Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Glacier (US National Parks), Ararat (since it's an actual mountain in the real world as well, not only mythical)
  • Planet Shout-Out: Tangerine Dream (see Shout-Out section below).
  • New Something: Common for the orbital habitats orbiting Yellowstone. Carousels (spinning habitats) named New Copenhagen and New Amsterdam are mentioned.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • What Dan Sylveste and the Nostalgia's crew unwillingly put into motion at the end of Revelation Space.
  • Earlier on, Khouri and Volyova's heroic efforts to stop a Hell-class weapon trying to destroy the whole planet of Resurgam, which would have resulted in the death of some tens of thousands of colonists, succeed in keeping the planet intact, allowing for Dan Sylveste's aforementioned actions and unleashing the Inhibitors on humanity in a war that kills trillions.
  • In the third book of the Revelation Space trilogy, the Inhibitors are finally wiped out; however, it is implied that their absence is what allows a swarm of von Neumann machines to eventually consume literally the entire universe. As such this also counts as an Inferred Holocaust.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: The Inhibitors are almost invincible. The only weapons able to hurt them are "hypometric weapons" that work by essentially erasing volumes of spacetime from existence (including any Inhibitor machinery), and the Conjoiner's forbidden "Cache Weapons" that are strong enough to blow a hole in the moon. The Inhibitors eventually become immune to the former (trying to erase them just stops working), and they effortlessly redirect the latter after they become aware of it.
• Non-Action Guy: Dan Sylveste in Revelation Space and most of the cast in Diamond Dogs.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The Hell class weapons aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. Justified, as the weapon's builders were so scared by both what they'd created and how they had created them, that they deliberately destroyed the plans and made no attempt to build more of them.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: For the large part, not so much Defied as cut up and made into decorative napkins. Many factions of humanity radically reshape themselves with as much concern as a person today getting a major tattoo or plastic surgery. On a typical walk through the hub of downtown Chasm City you're likely to pass centaurs, Cyborgs, and a few Transhuman Aliens. The Conjoiners embrace nanotech on an even more fundamental level, and the spacefaring Ultras seem to do this as a hobby to pass the time while shuttling between worlds. In a zig zag, however, the trope is enforced in other places by Space Amish or lack of infrastructure and resources
• Ocean Punk:
  • Any planet inhabited by the Pattern Jugglers, particularly the ones with established human colonies, e.g. Turquoise (deliberate colonization), Ararat (colonization by necessesity). The Jugglers favour wide open oceanic enviroments, so this is pretty much a given.
  • The Subaru Commonwealth colonies in the Pleaides star cluster, glimpsed in the short story Galactic North. They're a Juggler-less example.
• Off With Your Head:
  • Revelation Space has space suits with helmets designed to decapitate a person when the suit is breached, then cryo-freeze the head. This allows the person to be revived with prosthetics.
  • Jane Auntmonier in The Prefect, as part of a gambit to save her life. She gets better.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Dan Sylveste and his father, Calvin.
• Only Smart People May Pass: The plot of Diamond Dogs is a deconstruction of this trope and the characters.
• The Ophelia: Felka.
• Oracular Urchin: Aura again.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: The "Denizens", who were created by genetic engineering and are thorough fusions of human and fish DNA, along with sequences to secrete antifreeze and let them breathe hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. They look thoroughly monstrous.
• Path of Inspiration: The Quaicheist churches of Hela.
• Pig Man: Hyperpigs, most notably Scorpio and Sparver.
• Police Procedural: The spinoff novel series (Aurora Rising, Elysium Fire) centered on inspector Dreyfus, a Field Prefect of the Panoply, and his team members.
• Powered Armor: The "suits" are a very versatile example of this trope.
• Praetorian Guard / Knight Templar / Church Militant: The Cathedral Guard in Absolution Gap.
• Professor Guinea Pig: The first Conjoiners and Doctor Trintignant.
• Projected Man: Many of the entoptic simulations and personal avatars.
• Psycho for Hire: Grelier in Absolution Gap and pretty much any less than sympathetic Ultranaut or bounty hunter in the series.
• Ragnarök Proofing: The aversion is a major plot point of Revelation Space. In Absolution Gap, it's played straight with the Scuttlers' gravity radio (millions of years old), but averted with the Inhibitors devolving and ultimately being defeated after only a quarter of their four-billion-year mission.
• Reality Warper: The advanced technology with which the Conjoiners like to play often runs on this, especially since it doesn't just mess with space but with time as well. Hell-class weapons have inside them singularities that somehow don't collapse, and In Redemption Ark it's revealed that the mysterious lighthugger drives' energy source is, literally, the big bang - there is a tiny tear in timespace at their core through which they tap the unlimited energy available at the moment of the creation of the universe. Unfortunately, things can go really wrong when the tech - which the Conjoiners themselves don't fully understand, due to it having been passed onto them from far more advanced Conjoiners in the distant future - is abused; screwing up modifications to lighthugger drives can blow up small moons, and messing with inertia dampeners to achieve FTL travel can cause the equipment itself to tear up your ship, semisentient bubbles of timespace to wrap around you and squish you into a tiny ball, and time-space itself to self-rearrange and Ret-Gone you out of history.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • The Captain is very old. He is implied to have been a member of NASA, or the near-future equivalent. His middle name is Armstrong, actually.
  • Also, Nevil Clavain (born in the 22. century) is one of the oldest still living Conjoiners during the events of the main trilogy (which takes place in the 26.-28. century). When he dies in Absolution Gap and the news about his demise appears on the local TV news, Vasko Malinin notes that it's strange to see a birth and death date separated by five centuries.
  • The Ultranaut crews (and pretty much anyone who takes a lighthugger from one planetary system to the other) can live very long lives thanks to the relativistic travel speeds of interstellar spacecraft, and further extend this with their culture of casual Transhumanism.
• Ret-Gone: This is a danger of trying to build inertia-dampening fields and similar technology. A bad enough malfunction doesn't merely vaporize you but retroactively erases you, or your entire civilization, from existence, adapting history to suit.
• Rocks Fall Everybody Dies: In Absolution Gap , the Greenfly appears, the universe ends and the reader feels like their soul has been removed with pliers.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: Averted to virtually hilarious degrees by Volyova in Revelation Space. But even such a skilled and resourceful badass like her isn't Made of Iron, so she eventually gets hit hard by this trope in the second half of Redemption Ark (it's handled pretty subtly though).
• Sapient Ship: Nightingale, the Nostalgia For Infinity after the melding plague takes over, and Antoinette's ship
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Inhibitors live and breathe this trope and even self-justify their ultimate goals in a Well-Intentioned Extremist type of way.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Nevil Clavain is often a tragic Anti-Hero because he selflessly sacrifices a lot (including many things dear to him) in order to help those in need, even if they're oblivious to the coming threat and don't believe him.
• Schizo Tech: A corollary of the Used Future/Space Western setting, and the travel and communication lag times between worlds: colonies and even individual lighthuggers typically have a random hodgepodge of technologies available based on what new advances they have and haven't been privy to.
  • This trope is especially at play in the settlement of Chasm City, where the Melding Plague causes pretty much everything beyond 20th century technology to mutate wildly out of control. This has forced the denizens to find workarounds bridging the gap between relatively primitive but plague-proof tech safe for use in the city at large, mid-level tech that can be hardened at great effort and expense, and vulnerable advanced technology that can only be used in carefully quarantined settings. Well-off inhabitants of the lower city use steam powered vehicles and basic electronics alongside the plague-safe static products of nano- and bio- technology, while the inhabitants of the Canopy ride around in mechanically simple but computationally advanced cars that climb, slide, and jump along cables in the air, live in the remains of the horribly mutated buildings of Chasm City, and utilize Bio-Augmentation in place of personal nanotech.
• Serial Prostheses: John Brannigan had lived through the ages by gradual replacement his body parts with cybernetics. In Absolution Gap Antoinette Bax was able to see his past appearances in augmented reality on Nostalgia for Infinity. For Ultras in general, this is a common reason for their collective self-tinkering: the life of an Ultra is inherently hazardous, and many of them start down the path after suffering injuries that require replacement of limbs.
• Shout-Out:
  • Diamond Dogs has two of them in a sequence where the protagonist's party, about to enter a lethal maze, are dream-fed similar scenarios in case they help:
  'I had the same dream,' I said, wonderingly. 'And there was another dream in which I was inside some kind- of I halted, waiting for the words to assemble in my head. 'Some kind of underground tomb. I remember being chased down a corridor by an enormous stone ball which was going to roll over me.'
  Hirz nodded. 'The dream with the hat, right?'
  'My God, yes.' I grinned like a madman. 'I lost my hat, and I felt this ridiculous urge to rescue it!'
  • And:
  Celestine broke the silence, turning to Hirz. 'Did you have the one about the cubes, too?'
  'Christ, yes,' the infiltration specialist said, as if suddenly remembering. 'The cubes. What about you, Richard?' 'Indeed,' I answered, flinching at the memory of that one. I had been one of a party of people trapped inside an endless series of cubic rooms, many of which contained lethal surprises. 'I was cut into pieces by a trap, actually. Diced, if I remember accurately.'
  'Yeah. Not exactly on my top ten list of ways to die, either.'
  • There is also another Shout-Out implicit in the title, to David Bowie's album Diamond Dogs (which was based loosely on George Orwell's 1984).
  • 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 Tangerine Dream. Pre-Plague Yellowstone's ring of orbital habitats is called The Glitter Band. And the very name of the Pattern Jugglers may be a reference to a verse from King Crimson's well-known song In The Court Of The Crimson King.
  • The name of Roland Childe and his feverish attempts to decipher the secret of Blood Spire in Diamond Dogs is a reference to a verse from King Lear: "Child Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still 'Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man."
  • Chasm City refers to Ultra-supplied built-in eye night vision as "eyeshine".
• Shown Their Work: Reynolds is a former astronomer and a former ESA employee, and it shows constantly in the detailed and plausible future technologies and depictions of space
• Sinister Geometry: 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 are never seen — they disintegrate into dust when destroyed.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Scorpio, natch. Khouri, Volyova and Bax also have their moments.
• Space Brasília: Averted, particularly by the shantytown-like cities on Sky's Edge. The "historical" buildings were actually often built from cargo containers and prefabricated materials and the newer ones are more natural. Most town squares in the oldest cities of Sky's Edge have a triangular shape, since they were built around the triangular atmospheric shuttles that brought the colonists to the planet's surface from the orbiting Generation Ship. Also, Chasm City on the planet Yellowstone has enough variability in its architectural history, even though it's a typical high-tech metropolis.
• Space Elevator: On Sky's Edge in Chasm City.
• Space People: Many of the Ultranauts have never set foot on anything that isn't man-made. They're a loose and decentralised faction of humanity that are part this trope, and part Loveable Rogue antiheroes (or, sometimes outright antivillains or villains). Though small in their total population, Ultranauts are a very disparate group of people, ranging from normal humans to cyborgs, and from wanderers or traders to the equivalent of space pirates.
• Space Pirate: The Banshees pretty much fit the bill and are a thoroughly unromantic version of the trope. The Ultra(naut)s often have elements of this, but are not necessarily antagonistic.
• Space Western:
  • Bizarrely, even though the setting looks generally un-westernly, there are some elements of this trope thrown in - particularly in places like the Rust Belt and the Mulch on Yellowstone (lawlesness, smugglers, organized crime), or on Resurgam and Hela in general (pioneer settlements, backwater planets, unexplored wastelands, fairly low-tech infrastructure and economy, trucker-like travelers and workers). In the case of Resurgam and Hela, it's a crossover between Space Western and Mysterious Antarctica: Polar Explorer Western IN SPACE !
  • Chasm City is probably the best example of this, since it's mostly set on the habitable, but commercially backwater planet of Sky's Edge, torn by politicking and territorial wars between the colonists. Though it's kinda a mixed bag there: Space Western, but crossed with a Banana Republic slash Darkest Africa kind of enviroment.... IN SPACE !
• Spirit Advisor:
  • The Mademoiselle's beta-level sim in Ana Khouri's implants and probably Skade's too—not exactly a simple simulation.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • Implied in The Prefect Specifically, in relation to the nature of the Mademoiselle and the Melding Plague.
  • Also, possibly the origin of the Shadows, as their universe was being eaten by rogue terraformers, and at the end of Absolution Gap, the Greenfly was just starting to consume this universe.
• Starfish Aliens: Several, most notably the Pattern Jugglers, the Shrouders' fake appearance, the Grubs, the Scuttlers and the Nestbuilders.
• Star Killing: The Inhibitors "sing" Delta Pavonis apart^note using a 'graver', a gravitational-wave laser tuned to the frequency of the star in order to destroy the local human colony: having already wiped out one species native to the system millennia ago, they're determined to do the job for good this time. It's also offhandedly mentioned that they know fifteen different ways to destroy a dwarf star.
  • Not only do they kill the star, but they do so by first building a gigantic machine to take apart the system's gas giant, then use the material they recovered from that to produce the star-killing weapon - which is so large and so massive that a character notes it shouldn't even be possible for it to exist without collapsing in on itself. When they fire their weapon at the star, it doesn't just kill the star - it turns it into an astronomically huge Flamethrower.
• The Stars Are Going Out: By the end of Absolution Gap the stars are going green !
• Stealth in Space: Humans discover a loophole in thermodynamics that they use for this. Before that, they sometimes can fake it for short periods of time by using ships with very tightly collimated thrust.
• Subspace Ansible: Bizarrely subverted. Grubs have Black Box superluminal communication technology given by Jumper Clowns. Subversion comes from fact that communication device doesn't link with other devices but contains messages from the future and releases them in particular moments of time determined by patterns of the cosmic microwave background.
• Steam Never Dies: Lampshaded, justified and visually subverted in Chasm City, where the titular metropolis on the planet Yellowstone is connected with its outlying spaceport via a train powered by a steam locomotive. While the protagonist is a bit shocked by this fact at first, he discovers that the train's appearance and furnishings are decidedly aerodynamic, hi-tech and modern. The bullet-shaped steam locomotives only came into service because a nanotech plague devastated the city years ago, rendering a lot of sensitive electronics and electric-based equipment aboard the original types too risky to use. The steam itself is not produced by burning fuel, but is mined from the titular chasm of the planet, which vents it in large quantities, along with organic gases.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Reynolds has a rather annoying tendency to kill off a lot of the principal characters from the main trilogy in each installment. A good indicator of who will die next is when you notice they've been Demoted to Extra.
• The Atoner: Captain John Brannigan. The only crime mentioned is that he overwrote the brain patterns of his first mate, and replaced them with his own brain patterns, effectively 'killing' the person as he was. It's implied he's done worse.
• Time Dilation: Ubiquitous.
• Title Drop:
  • The last words of the fourth chapter of Revelation Space.
  • Redemption Ark also has a less straightforward one in one of the end chapters. It's also a general motif for what's going on in that novel captain Brannigan slowly becoming an atoner and the Nostalgia evacuating Resurgam.
  • At the end of a chapter in Absolution Gap, when Grelier mentions the alternate name of "Ginnungagap Rift" in his internal monologue.
  • The middle of the tenth (or so) chapter of Diamond Dogs.
  • The opening quote of Turquoise Days.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Volyova and Khouri, to an extent. Khouri doesn't fit the stereotype fully, since she's an accomplished and more than capable former soldier.
• Tragic Bigot: Captain Van Ness from Weather (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.
• Transhuman Treachery: Nearly always averted, but...
  • Aurora in The Prefect is an instance.
  • Often invoked in-universe by people opposed to the Conjoiners and their way of life.
• Trash the Set: At the end of Galactic North, almost all terrestrial planets of the Milky Way were devoured by the Greenfly.
• Tree Vessel: There's a version of this. The "Greenfly" infestation that is depicted taking over the galaxy in Absolution Gap is shown to be billions of self-contained biospheres containing trees and tree-like plants.
• Truly Single Parent: Calvin Sylveste in Revelation Space.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Oh, you've managed to alert the Inhibitors, ey, humanity ? Run, just RUN. And fight back as much as you can. They WILL NOT GIVE UP.
• The Everyman / Unfazed Everyman:
  • Ana Khouri is the most ordinary of the trilogy's main cast. Unsurprisingly, she's also technically The Hero. And she's the only major character who survives throughout the entire trilogy. If you don't count the good old Nostalgia for Infinity and captain Brannigan, that is...
  • Also Vasko Malinin from Absolution Gap.
• The Unpronounceable: A lot of Conjoiners' real names, consisting as they do of "a string of interiorised qualia" are this.
• Unflinching Walk: At the end of Absolution Gap.
• Ungovernable Galaxy: For want of the Faster-Than-Light Travel, most of the star systems are rarely visited by starships and actually lawless. And governments are limited by planet surfaces and their orbits.
• Uplifted Animal: The hyperpigs and hyperprimates. Nobody's actually sure why the pigs happened, with theories ranging from genetic engineering to make them more compatible human organ donors that went a little too well, to a deliberate attempt at creating a Slave Race. They vary in degree of sentience and human-like anatomy and are usually either abused menials or criminals. The origins of the hyperprimates aren't discussed, but they seem to have it a lot better: though they also do menial labor, they have a tight-knit community/very strong trade union such that no sane human wants to piss them off.
• Used Future: So very used. Let's just say that during the era in which the main trilogy is set, most of the glory days of the human interstellar colonies are only a distant memory.
• Villain Protagonist: The short stories A Spy in Europa, Grafenwalder's Bestiary. Also large parts of the novel Chasm City.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The 'Hell-class' weapons can blast big holes in a planet's crust. Others can destroy stars (or so we're told).
  • The Hypometric weapons are rather less flamboyant, but in many ways more alarming. They simply cause everything in a specific volume of space to just... disappear. No debris, no radiation, no explosion. The effect propagates at lightspeed, and appears to be impossible to defend against (though perhaps the Inhibitors might have some tricks in that regard).
  • The Inhibitors have a range of techniques and designs for dealing with troublesome interstellar species. 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 up to eleven 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.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Khouri towards her daughter Aura.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Inhibitors believe themselves to be this. They destroy interstellar civilizations so that they can't interfere with the Inhibitor's efforts to mitigate the damage the Andromeda Galaxy will cause when it collides with the Milky Way about four billion years from now. Other characters question how true to this lofty goal the Inhibitors really are.
• We Will Not Use Photoshop in the Future: Averted in The Great Wall of Mars.
• Wetware CPU: Conjoiner drives always contain a Conjoiner brain, who controls the reaction. Another Conjoiner who almost became one likens the experience to spending your life playing a challenging video game. However, the Conjoiners keep it quiet because they expect other humans to react badly.
• What a Piece of Junk: The Nostalgia For Infinity in the Revelation Space series. It's falling to pieces, with some sections entirely exposed to vacuum or overran by corrupted or broken machines, but it's by far the most powerful and deadly ship in known space - before it gets the alien technology. The hell-class weapons it carries could presumably raze the surface of a planet.
• What Happened to the Mouse? / Left Hanging: Several storylines in the trilogy weren't resolved at all, particularly the whole case about The Mademoiselle.
• Wretched Hive: The crime and decay ridden lower and ground-level parts of post-Plague Chasm City, known collectively as The Mulch.
• Zen Survivor: Horris Quiache from Absolution Gap is a particularly dark and tragic example of this.
• Zeppelins from Another World: Airships of the blimp variety (so not actual zeppelins) are used for transport and research purposes on Turquoise and for military scouting and gunship support on Sky's Edge.

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