SF: Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds (re-read)

A follow-up if not a sequel to Revelation Space - this time though it's mostly about the lives of an incidental character from the previous book, and also introduces the main theme for the series from a different perspective. Yes, the text in this sentence is correct - nothing like being postmortal.

The story takes place in parallel, in three centuries with three different threads interleaved to form a much more substantial tale - which really challenges the idea of one character having one identity. The story starts in the middle, working forward in the main text and backwards through dreams & memories - and fits together better than this sounds. Turns out that the main character is a truly nasty piece of work, and we discover what the edge was that Sky must have had.

This begins to really introduce much more detail of what Chasm City life is like, and how the folks are getting on now their lovely technology isn't quite so healthy, in a watch-you-don't-get-trapped-in-a-mutating-building kind of way.

It occurs to me that in some ways these stories are similar to the "Cities in Flight" series - apparently unrelated tales which are linked as part of a bigger story. However, in this case they are linked though a small number of characters. It's interesting when you compare this with Peter F Hamilton's style, of a cast of thousands all intertwined through 3000+ pages of book. It's odd - here I am writing about other books, but AJR I guess can't be summed up in a few words. A good read, and have just finished the sequel.