The Prefect by Alastair ReynoldsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this as preparation for reading Elysium Fire, second in this subseries. Now I really wish I had read Revelation Space first. But at this point I am used to joining series mid-stream, so was able to interpolate pretty well. This is pretty classic space opera, but the emphasis is really on the stoic Tom Dreyfus and the dedicated Space-FBI Panoply. The society is a pretty direct lift from 20th century Europe, and the technology pretty much assumes you are a veteran science fiction reader and don't really need to have an explanation of how the Glitter Band's space technology works. Or maybe that's in Revelation Space. In any case, it's a very competent story, with a good amount of excitement and mechanical know-how. We have a nod to racism in Tom's relationship with hyper-pig Sparber (no other examples of his kind, so we don't really know much about them), but it too is very 20th-century. Not sure yet if I'm going to back up to read the others or not. But this one is fine.
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