Absolution Gap

The third Inhibitor novel, and the strangest of the three: its centre of gravity is a moon whose gas giant intermittently vanishes, and a set of mobile cathedrals that crawl across the surface to keep the object permanently in view, because an unexplained disappearance has been turned into a religion. The book is doing something that recurs across Reynolds — taking a piece of physics and asking what institutions people would build around not being able to explain it.

Context: B tier, “also worth reading,” carded as volume three of the Revelation Space entry. The a16z page groups it with Revelation Space and Redemption Ark as the Inhibitor sequence; a fourth Inhibitor novel, Inhibitor Phase (2021), appears on the source page but has no card yet.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Alastair Reynolds — the author.
• Revelation Space · Redemption Ark — the two volumes before it.
• Chasm City · The Prefect · Elysium Fire · Machine Vendetta — the rest of the universe as the list gives it.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.