Machine Vendetta: 3 (The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies)

Product Information

Dreyfus and Ng start working on clues that bring out vital facts about Aurora’s origins that might give them and Panoply a fighting chance at surviving her onslaught against them. Tench was a good agent, but very private, and the discovery of a daughter leads many to wonder what other secrets Tench was keeping, and if these secrets became too much to keep, with suicide the only way out. How Alastair Reynolds creates not only a galaxy but a complex and multi prong plot that satisfies completely is beyond me!

You don't need to have read the previous books - enough of the backstories are given along the way to explain to newcomers - but those who have read the previous novels will appreciate what happens more. So why did she walk alone and unarmed into a habitat with a vicious grudge against her organization?Machine Vendetta" has everything: adults with the size and mental development of babies; bombed monasteries; secret cults secretly building a computer to trap two near-gods; upgraded pigs and lemurs: a mysterious mansion on a deserted asteroid; a 100 page section of non-stop action; two competing evil near omnipotent A I upgrades; long-lived interstellar posts human traders and their miles long ships; the list goes on. I don't know if this is a counterpoint to some of the police abuse stories we've seen recently, but it's hard not to see it as such.

There is big trouble in the Glitter Band, the ten thousand habitats of which are patrolled by a force of only a thousand prefects of the Panoply. This is solid British SF adventure, evoking echoes of le Carre and Sayers with a liberal dash of Doctor Who. These characters seem real and lived in, with lives outside their jobs, different ways of approaching problems, and each other.No, I hadn't, this was simply a case of Reynolds having a lot of stuff happen outside of the written story. Dreyfus feels that the death may be related to Tench’s ongoing secret investigation of Catopsis, sanctioned by Dreyfus after the events of Elysium Fire. Insurrection is rising, and the destruction of part of a peaceful jungle-like habitat, Valsko-Venev, seems to have been instigated by Mizler Cranach, seemingly a rogue hyper-pig Prefect, an event which has created distrust towards the Prefects and inspired racist xenophobia as the act is seen as a racist attack. A mix of hard science with space opera, big ideas, and again characters that readers want to know more about. Alastair Reynolds has produced a fine, fast-paced thriller in Machine Vendetta, the third, and apparently final novel in the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies series.

I'm getting a little jaded on evil AI stories, but Reynolds has a different approach that is intriguing. This novel's ideas are mind-stretching, including a limbo where copies of the dead can be kept and interrogated, and a chillingly mischievous AI that tempts and mocks Dreyfus.The relentless narrative momentum it employs simply underscores the pertinent urgency of that topic. The Panoply is a small but mighty police and peacekeeping organization of which Tom Dreyfus is a high ranking officer. As with the the other Alastair Reynolds space opera novels I have read, this was quite entertaining and was just what I needed. You could read the book as a standalone, but a lot of the characters overlap from previous stories, so you'd be better advised to go in sequence.

As his colleagues pick up the pieces following her death, Prefect Tom Dreyfus must face his conscience. I really like the universe that Alastair Reynolds creates in the space opera "Machine Vendetta": A massive swarm of over 10,000 independent orbital habitats, a fleet of far flung post-human spacefarers, an elite team of agents protecting the voting rights of the local citizens in a colonized solar system, and just to keep things interesting, a couple of god-like AI's that do not share empathy with humanity. Still, once things started popping a little over halfway through the book, I found myself racing through it. So why did she walk alone and virtually unarmed into a habitat with a vicious grudge against her organisation?What I think appeals to me most about science fiction as a genre is that there is no shortage of stories or imagination. I met my wife in the Netherlands through a mutual interest in climbing and we married back in Wales. It's fun to see more stories set in the Glitter Band and also to be reminded why the Revelation Space Universe is the worst place ever to live. Panoply is a small, efficient police force, dedicated to maintaining the rule of democracy among the ten thousand disparate city-states orbiting the planet Yellowstone.