Prefect Dreyfus Emergency

With eight short stories and novellas—including three original to this collection—Galactic North imparts the centuries-spanning events that have produced the dark and turbulent world of Revelation Space.

The eight stories are:
Great Wall of Mars.
Glacial.
A Spy in Europa.
Weather.
Dilation Sleep.
Grafenwalder's Bestiary.
Nightingale.
Galactic North.

Reynolds states in the afterword to the collection that the stories are set in rough chronological order, with "Great Wall of Mars" occurring around AD 2200, whilst Galactic North extends to AD 40 000

2057. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. But when Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, inexplicably leaves its natural orbit and heads out of the solar system at high speed, Bella is ordered to shadow it for the few vital days before it falls forever out of reach.

In accepting this mission she sets her ship and her crew on a collision course with destiny—for Janus has many surprises in store, and not all of them are welcome...

Late in the twenty-sixth century, the human race has advanced enough to accidentally trigger the Inhibitors - alien killing machines designed to detect intelligent life and destroy it. The only hope for humanity lies in the recovery of a secret cache of doomsday weapons -and a renegade named Clavain who is determined to find them. But other factions want the weapons for their own purposes - and the weapons themselves have another agenda altogether...

Six million years ago, at the dawn of the star-faring era, Abigail Gentian fractured herself into a thousand male and female clones, which she called shatterlings. But now, someone is eliminating the Gentian line. Campion and Purslane—two shatterlings who have fallen in love and shared forbidden experiences—must determine exactly who, or what, their enemy is, before they are wiped out of existence.

In the third book of the legendary Revelation Space trilogy, the last remnants of humanity realize that forging an alliance with a greater and even more mysterious alien force may be their only chance for survival.The Inhibitors were designed to eliminate any life form reaching a certain level of intelligence -- and they've targeted Humanity. War veteran Clavain and a ragtag group of refugees have fled into hiding. Their leadership is faltering, and their situation is growing more desperate. But their little colony has just received an unexpected an avenging angel with the power to lead mankind to safety -- or draw down its darkest enemy.And as she leads them to an apparently insignificant moon light-years away, it begins to dawn on Clavain and his companions that to beat one enemy, it may be necessary to forge an alliance with something much worse . . ."Absolution Gap is a good as it gets, and should solidify Alastair Reynolds' reputation as one of the best hard SF writers in the field." -- SF Site

The once-utopian Chasm City—a doomed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planet—has been overrun by a virus known as the Melding Plague, capable of infecting any body, organic or computerized. Now, with the entire city corrupted—from the people to the very buildings they inhabit—only the most wretched sort of existence remains. For security operative Tanner Mirabel, it is the landscape of nightmares through which he searches for a low-life postmortal killer. But the stakes are raised when his search brings him face to face with a centuries-old atrocity that history would rather forget.

Nine hundred thousand years ago, something wiped out the Amarantin.

For the humans now settling the Amarantin homeworld, it's of little more than academic interest, even after the discovery of a long-hidden, almost perfect city and a colossal statue of a winged Amarantin.

For brilliant, ruthless scientist Dan Sylveste, it's more than merely intellectual curiosity - and he will stop at nothing to get at the truth. Even if it costs him everything.

But the Amarantin were wiped out for a reason, and that danger is closer and greater than even Syveste imagines...

The original novel in the epic series, Revelation Space was nominated for both the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke awards. Reynolds' PhD in astronomy and experience with the ESA means that his space operas present hard science spins on intergalactic adventures and have impacted SF for years.

Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different—and rigidly enforced—level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains . . .

Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels—and with the dying body comes bad news.

If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality—and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability . . .

Terminal World is a snarling, drooling, crazy-eyed mongrel of a book: equal parts steampunk, western, planetary romance, and far-future SF.