Chasm City

A standalone revenge story set in the same universe, and the best single entry point to it if a trilogy is too much of a commitment. Its subject is a city: Chasm City on the world of Yellowstone was the most advanced settlement humanity had built, its architecture and infrastructure grown and managed by machines, until a plague that infected nanotechnology rather than cells turned all of that into something deformed and half-alive. A hunter arrives to find his target in what is left.

Context: B tier, “also worth reading,” listed under the Revelation Space entry — on the source page it sits outside both sub-series, as the one volume that stands alone. For a reader who thinks about infrastructure, the interest is the failure mode: a city whose systems are self-building, and therefore corruptible.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Alastair Reynolds — the author.
• Revelation Space · Redemption Ark · Absolution Gap — the Inhibitor sequence.
• The Prefect · Elysium Fire · Machine Vendetta — the Dreyfus novels.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.