Russell Letson Reviews Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds
Machine Vendetta, Alastair Reynolds (Orbit US 978-0316462846, $19.99, 416pp, tp) January 2024.
Synchronicity strikes again with a pair of novels – both parts of long-running future-history series – that show what can be done with a particular set of science-fictional motifs and devices, especially when the series format offers room to stretch out.
Alastair Reynolds’s Machine Vendetta is the third entry in a subseries of his vast Revelation Space future history. This sequence, now titled The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies, is set at a 25th-century high point in human interstellar expansion, in the thriving, ambitious Glitter Band, a swarm of habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone in the Epsilon Eridani system. It is a setting rich in science-fictional motifs, tropes, and devices: a star-spanning (if sub-lightspeed) civilization; technologies that allow enormous changes in human bodies and minds; computational systems that permit fully autonomous artificial intelligences and the recording of whole personalities; and the novel and wide-ranging social arrangements enabled by all those technologies. But the structural armature comes from another literary clan altogether: the murder mystery, intrigue thriller, police procedural, and serial-killer genres.
The Emergencies are a series of linked crimes and crises faced by its protagonist, Tom Dreyfus, a senior prefect of Panoply, the Glitter Band’s sole system-wide authority. Panoply is not a conventional police force but the agency that oversees and protects the Common Articles, the overarching agreement that binds together the variegated social-legal-economic systems adopted by the thousands of polities. Under this radically volunteerist-libertarian framework, constant polling (enabled by neural implants and computer-based polling devices) allows a habitat’s population to establish any way of life, no matter how strange or pathological, and Panoply’s primary task is to maintain the integrity of the polling machineries and protocols and to enforce a small handful of systemwide thou-shalt-nots.
The idiosyncracies possible in the Glitter Band are presented early, with Dreyfus ‘‘knee-deep in a mob of angry babies,’’ citizens of the Obligate Infantile State, a polity where all accept ‘‘forced developmental regression to an infant body-template, surrendering most of their higher mental faculties along the way… with just a thin smear of language and comprehension on top, just enough to satisfy the basic requirements of democratic participation.’’ For no reason Dreyfus can see, the citizens are pitching a collective tantrum, shredding their AI-enabled stuffed toys. But events quickly go from farcical to grim, as Prefect Ingvar Tench is lured to a hazardous, ‘‘watchlisted’’ habitat where she is caught up in a civil war and her death is made to appear a kind of suicide. Other ugly matters have been piling up – a terroristic bombing, the loss of another prefect in an anomalous situation – and then Dreyfus is visited by the two AIs who figured in earlier cases.
The capricious, manipulative, and often heartless entity that calls itself Aurora (whose virtual presentation is a sympathetic young woman) is engaged in a struggle with the even nastier, entirely sadistic Clockmaker. Both are loose in the Glitter Band’s computational infrastructure, and as long as they are at odds with each other, they cannot do much mischief to the human world. But that could change should one or the other lose, and they both sense that someone is working to contain and constrain them, and both want Dreyfus and Panoply to find out who is behind it and stop them.
So Dreyfus and his colleagues visit trouble spots and crime scenes and retrace Ingvar Tench’s movements in search of the reason for her murder, a process that offers looks at more of the Glitter Band’s variety. Dreyfus needs a favor from the Harbourmaster of the Parking Swarm, the Band’s docking precinct, which leads to his refereeing a dispute among the highly modified and arrogant Ultras who crew the visiting starships. Thalia Ng interviews the lemur-like, berry-eating, arboreal citizens whose habitat was badly damaged by what appeared to be a suicidal attack by a rogue proctor. Hyperpig Sparver Bancal pursues a lead to what looks like an unfinished bit of asteroid real-estate development and finds instead an abandoned chateau with some unexpected domestic features and a death-trap. And some of these visits set off lethal reactions not only to individuals but large parts of the Glitter Band itself.
The governing rules of the plot-machine are those of the conspiracy thriller and serial-killer hunt, with dead ends and long-slumbering secrets and periodic spasms of violence and ticking-bomb suspense as the investigative threads gradually converge on not one but a series of climactic confrontations and reveals before things settle down for a genuine, final The End. The whole mystery proves to be complex and painful, and its resolution – which is not the same as a victory – requires sacrifice. This might be the last emergency Dreyfus has to contain, but the slice of future history that contains the Glitter Band has already proved to be too rich a source of story material for Reynolds to resist revisiting.
Russell Letson, Contributing Editor, is a not-quite-retired freelance writer living in St. Cloud MN. He has been loitering around the SF world since childhood and been writing about it since his long-ago grad school days. In between, he published a good bit of business-technology and music journalism. He is still working on a book about Hawaiian slack key guitar.
This review and more like it in the April 2024 issue of Locus.
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