14 Best Alastair Reynolds Books

Security specialist Tanner Mirabel comes to the once glittering Chasm City to avenge a murder, only to find a metropolis rotted by a nanotech plague. As he hunts his target through baroque slums and orbital habitats, his own identity starts to unravel.

In a far future where starships crawl between systems at near light speed, archaeologist Dan Sylveste hunts the truth behind a vanished alien race. A plague stricken warship and a hired killer need him for their own reasons, drawing them toward a buried machine threat.

Six million years from now, cloned heirs of Abigail Gentian travel the galaxy in slow circuits, reuniting every couple of hundred thousand years to trade memories. When two shatterlings, Campion and Purslane, arrive late to a reunion and find it under attack, they uncover a secret that could erase whole civilisations.

The Inhibitors, ancient machine beings that prune intelligent life, have noticed humanity at last. Conjoiner renegade Clavain races rival factions to recover hidden super weapons and evacuate a vulnerable colony world before the machines turn its sun into an instrument of extinction.

Scattered human survivors flee the Inhibitors to harsh worlds where strange beliefs take root. On the icy moon Hela, pilgrims chase a wandering cathedral in search of a prophecy, while elsewhere old allies struggle to keep one last refuge hidden from the machines.

In an alternate 1950s Paris where the Nazi invasion never succeeded, down on his luck jazz musician Wendell Floyd works as a private detective. Centuries away, archaeologist Verity Auger is sent through a wormhole to that same frozen copy of Earth, tasked with retrieving a dead woman's secrets.

Two years after Aurora Rising, senior prefect Tom Dreyfus faces a new crisis as citizens across the Glitter Band begin to die when their neural implants overheat. While panic spreads and habitats threaten to secede from Panoply's authority, Dreyfus has to untangle a plot that reaches back into his own organisation's past.

Galactic North gathers most of the shorter fiction set in the Revelation Space universe, from early Conjoiner wars to far future outposts. Expect first contact missions, haunted starships, and glimpses of how seemingly minor choices echo across millennia of human history.

Captain Bella Lind and the crew of the comet miner Rockhopper are sent to chase Janus, one of Saturn's moons, when it suddenly leaves orbit under its own power. Trapped on an alien vessel they can never leave, they must build a fragile civilisation on the move.

In a distant future solar system rebuilt from rubble, sisters Adrana and Arafura Ness sign on to a treasure hunting ship that cracks open sealed baubles for ancient tech. Their first voyage ends in betrayal and bloodshed, leaving Fura determined to hunt down the legendary pirate Bosa Sennen.

Senior prefect Tom Dreyfus polices the democratic Glitter Band, a ring of ten thousand orbital habitats around Yellowstone. A shattered station and a subtle vote rigging scheme lead him toward a rogue artificial intelligence that may be willing to tear the system apart to save it.

Ship's doctor Silas Coade keeps waking into slightly different expeditions aboard vessels named Demeter, from a wooden schooner to a starship, all hunting a mysterious structure called the Edifice. As disasters repeat with subtle changes, Silas realises his shifting reality hides a very different kind of mission.

Beyond the Aquila Rift is a career spanning sampler of Alastair Reynolds' short fiction, mixing Revelation Space stories with standalones like the haunting title piece and Trauma Pod. It is a convenient way to see the range of his ideas in bite sized form.

In 2080, with runaway climate change close to irreversibly collapsing food supplies, a group of scientists gamble on a risky time travel experiment that sends minds, not bodies, into the past. When an elderly schoolteacher and a young woman in 2028 become linked, both must decide what they are willing to change.