The Prefect

A police procedural inside a piece of civil infrastructure. The Glitter Band is ten thousand orbital habitats around one planet, each running whatever social system it likes, held together by exactly one shared institution: a democratic voting apparatus, policed by prefects who have no authority over anything else. Tom Dreyfus investigates the destruction of a habitat and finds a software entity working to take the whole apparatus over. Reissued in 2017 as Aurora Rising.

Context: B tier, “also worth reading,” and the first of what the source page calls the Dreyfus Emergencies — which a16z rate “possibly better” than the original Inhibitor trilogy. It is also the most directly relevant book in the series for anyone who works on systems whose only real product is trust in a shared protocol.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Alastair Reynolds — the author.
• Elysium Fire · Machine Vendetta — the second and third Dreyfus novels.
• Revelation Space · Redemption Ark · Absolution Gap · Chasm City — the rest of the universe.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.