#bone silence

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Title: Bone Silence | Author: Alastair Reynolds | Publisher: Gollancz (2020)

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Bone Silence, by Alastair Reynolds

I just finished “Bone Silence” by Alastair Reynolds. Hmmm. I didn’t dislike this book, but I can’t honestly say that I loved it either. Under the cut, some very ambivalent and hand-wavy thoughts...

“Bone Silence” finishes off the trilogy that started with “Revenger”, following the Ness sisters, Adrana and Arafura, as they make their chaotic way through the thousands of inhabited artificial wordlets that make up the Congregation.

I liked “Revenger”, but as this series went on, I enjoyed it less and less.

There are three key problems, I think.

The first is that too many aspects of the setting just don’t quite work for me. The economics in particular is teeth-griding - the Cognregation has a currency that they have no control over at all? How does that even work? Even under a gold standard, the government can mint coins. Quoins, by contrast, aren’t made by anyone alive, and it’s even possible that they may not ever have been made by human hands. Also, given that the face value of the quoin is set by the glowing bars on it, and these are not subject to alteration by any human agency, I’ve got a feeling that this implies some very nasty things for how interest rates would work (or not) inside the Congregation.

Basically I’m just not convinced that the Congregation's financial structure would ever be viable.

We also have the usual Reynolds vagueness about institutional politics. The Congregation may have some sort of central organisation, but it’s never described. Individual wheels, worlds and spindles seem to mostly be run by organised crime, when they have any kind of overt social structure at all. We’re told that laws exist, but no-one seems to make them. The closest thing we see to an institutional structure - the Revenue fleet under Incer Stallis - is apparently coordinated by a vague grouping of (unnamed) banks and financial institutions.

(An insurance company with an army? Isn’t that, uh, essentially a government?)

I could go on for hours about the world-building - honestly I’m dubious about the stability of the Congregation itself, from a celestial dynamical PoV. (Thousands of worldlets, but worldlets large enough to have appreciable gravitation - it’s like the three body problem on cocaine!) Then we have (one of) Bone Silence’s big revelations, namely that apparently the Sun is going out? How, exactly? The Sun is a textbook Main Sequence star, and MS stars are doubly-stable against expansion and contraction (hydrodynamical equilibrium is literally the reason why we even have stars in the first place). If the Sun were to expand, the pressure in its core would fall, reducing the fusion rate and thus cooling it and making it shrink. Then if it were to shrink too far, the core pressure would rise, accelerating the fusion rate and heating the star up, thus making it expand!

(What, specifically, is wrong with the Sun is never explained, except that we’re informed that the quoins can somehow fix it. I suppose pouring money into the Sun is a bit better than pouring it into a swallower, but it still feels a little dubious!)

Now we get to the characters.

Honestly, as the series has gone on, I’ve found Adrana and Arafura’s headspace to be less and less pleasant. By the third book, their actions are quite amoral, and arguably counterproductive. (If they hadn’t attacked the Merry Mare, for quite dubious reasons, most of the plot could have been avoided.) Meanwhile the book takes an almost sadistic glee in killing off the nicer characters. Tindouf, Prozzer, Strambli (sort of) ... the bodycount escalates rapidly.

Then we get to the main villain, who’s introduced surprisingly late in the book. Incer Stallis is, frankly, a smug, tedious little sadist. There’s nothing interesting or appealing about his character. He’s just unpleasant. Honestly, when he was finally killed off, there wasn’t even much satisfaction, just a sort of “thank goodness that’s over” feeling to it.

As for the many mysteries of the trilogy, such as the origins of the Congregation or what causes the start of Occupations, we get maybe a third of an answer. Adrana and Arafura form their own opinions based on what they see aboard the whaleship - except, there’s very little evidence for those conclusions. All you can really deduce from what they see is that the history of human-alien interactions is longer than either party believes. The conclusions Adrana reaches really are a bit of a reach, and much like the end of Mass Effect 3, the evidence-in-the-text actually feels like it’s pointing in a different direction to where the author’s trying to send you.

(A small spoiler: while the whaleship is impressive, it shows nothing like the technology required to successfully-demolish a solar system. I don’t think my pet theory - namely that the human inhabitants of the Congregation are not in any way the descendants of its builders - has been disproven.)

There are other mysteries too. Why did Trevanza Reach relocate itself out to the whaleship? (The proximal anser is “Tazaknakak pressed a button without really knowing what it did”, of course, but the question remains - why did the spindle-turned-spaceship happen to have a course to the whaleship pre-programmed in it? What did it “think” it would find out there?) Why is Trevanza Reach apparently the only settlement that’s also a functioning spaceship? What happened to all the other proto-Trevanzas that were once contained inside the whaleship? Also, the whole whaleship system is a bizarre one - why reseed the Congregation every 22,000 years? What’s so special about that number? And what was the plan for when the whaleship ran out of little proto-Trevanzas to drop in amongst the other worldlets?

So overall, I come away from this book feeling dissatisfied.

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Bone Silence (Revenger #3) by Alastair Reynolds

Bone Silence (Revenger #3) by #AlastairReynolds a #bookreview by #coblogger @Angelhearte @gollancz

Two sisters ran away from home to join the crew of a spaceship. They took on pirates, faced down monsters and survived massacres . . . and now they’re in charge. Captaining a fearsome ship of their own, adventures are theirs for the taking. But Captain Bosa’s fearsome reputation still dogs their heels, and they’re about to discover that, out in space, no one forgives, and no one forgets . . .

Ho…

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Shadow Captain (Revenger #2) by Alastair Reynolds

Another #bookreview today with #ShadowCaptain #coblogger @Angelhearte #AlastairReynolds @gollancz

Returning to the universe of Revenger, award-winning author Alastair Reynolds delivers another thrilling tale set among the stars.

Two sisters ran away from home to join the crew of a spaceship. They took on pirates, faced down monsters and survived massacres . . . and now they’re in charge. Captaining a fearsome ship of their own, adventures are theirs for the taking – and there’s hoards to loot…

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Revenger (Revenger #1) by Alastair Reynolds

Check out my #coblogger's #bookreview of #Revenger by #AlastairReynolds 😊 @gollancz @orionbooks

The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilizations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives.

And there are vast fortunes to be made, if you know where to find them.

Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It’s their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds which have been hidden away, booby-trapped,…

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Bone Silence / Revenger 3 // Book Review

Bone Silence, the final installment to the Revenger trilogy is here. Does it answer the questions the Ness sisters and I have?

Thank you to Gollancz/Orion Publishing and Netgalley for the review copy in exchange for an honest review. This does not change my opinion in anyway.

 Book: Bone Silence (Revenger 3) by Alastair Reynolds Release Date: January 30th 2020 Tags: Young Adult / Sci-Fi / Space Opera / Space Ships / Moving Worlds / Aliens / Family / Crew Trigger/Content Warnings: Graphic Violence / Mutilation / Talk of…

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