Chasm City

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chasm City is a science fiction - novel of Alastair Reynolds in the tradition of space opera . It appeared in the USA in 2001 and was first published in Germany in 2003 by Heyne-Verlag. The book is part of the loosely connected Revelation Space cycle .

Summary

Chasm City is about the professional killer Tanner Mirabel , who is on the hunt for the murderer of his employer Cahuella and his wife. To do this, he leaves his homeworld Sky's Edge , which is constantly in civil war , which orbits the star 61 Cygni -A, and travels to Chasm City , the capital of the planet Yellowstone , which orbits the star Epsilon Eridani .

Once there, some surprises await him. First he has to learn that the once thriving system of Yellowstone has fallen victim to the melt epidemic , a kind of virus that attacks and mutates nanotechnology. The former glittering band of habitats that circled the planet has now become a poor rust belt .

But as if that wasn't enough, his memories also begin to change. Apparently caused by an indoctrination virus, the criminal and unscrupulous founding father of his homeworld, Sky Haussmann , manifests in his head. Due to the adverse circumstances of hunting and being hunted, his mental state becomes more and more unstable and his journey more and more a game of confusion to a degree that has only been known from Philip K. Dick , and leads to a surprising climax.

content

The novel contains three storylines that are told in parallel. Although separated in space and time, these storylines come together in the end.

Santiago

The spaceship Santiago is part of a fleet of generation ships , with which a strange world is to be colonized by humans. The ships reach 8% speed of light and are en route for approx. 150 years to reach the destination Journey's End . While the passengers - called momios - spend the journey in a cold sleep, the crew is awake and lives on the ship for several generations. After the Islamabad , one of the five ships, is destroyed by an explosion of antimatter fuel, the relationship between the crews of the five ships has cooled and become suspicious.

Schuyler-Sky-Haussmann is the son of the head of security Titus on the Santiago , his mother died in the Islamabad explosion . When his father is dying after an assassination attempt, he confesses to Sky that the Momios are almost immortal due to genetic treatment and that Sky is not his real son, but a thawed passenger and therefore also immortal. From now on, Sky tries to seize power in the ship by spinning intrigues and not shrinking from murder.

When Sky investigates the rumor about a sixth ship - flying away from the fleet - he discovers an organic structure that has externally copied the shape of the other spaceships. This all-building is inhabited by a 30 m long maggot that has been living for thousands of years and communicates with its auxiliary maggots via the secretion of a red liquid. She tells Sky the story of her people, who have long been on the run from the machine creatures who play a central role in the other novels of the Revelation cycle. Sky , who was the first person to come into contact with an extraterrestrial intelligent life form, is so disgusted with the maggot and its loneliness that he destroys it and its ship out of hatred.

Sky's goal is to be the first ship to reach the target planet with the Santiago. It reduces the weight of the ship by throwing dead - but also living - passengers and their cooling systems overboard. This allows the Santiago to brake harder and later start braking to reach its destination. First celebrated as a hero after landing, he soon falls from grace and lets himself be put into a cold sleep.

Sky's Edge

Approx. 200 years after the generation ships landed, there is permanent civil war on the planet, which has its origins in the hostility of the various spaceships and, above all, in Sky's unscrupulousness. After falling asleep , Sky trades in illegal weapons under the name Cahuella . He and his partner Gitta , who is probably the only one who knows his past, are protected from the acts of revenge by deceived business partners and competitors by the bodyguard Tanner Mirabel . In particular, Argent Reivich , whose family was murdered with Cahuella's weapons, seeks his life.

During a dispute, Gitta is taken hostage by a Reivich soldier . Tanner tries a rescue shot but kills Gitta and seriously injures Cahuella . In revenge, Cahuella has Tanner tortured to death. Before that, however, he has Tanner's memories scanned. He has this imprinted on his own brain by Ultras in order to be able to leave the planet disguised as Tanner Mirabel with additional support from genetic modification and plastic surgery and pursue Reivich in order to get revenge on him. With a lightship he follows Reivich's trail to the planet Yellowstone .

Chasm City

In one of the few intact habitats of the rust belt , Cahuella is now coming to. The cold sleep has suppressed all of his memories except those of Tanner Mirabel , so that he actually thinks he is. In search of Reivich , he ends up in the largest city in Yellowstones - Chasm City . Since the melt epidemic , this has been divided into two areas - the mulch , which extends over the floor and the first floors of the buildings, and the canopy , which spans kilometers between the high-rise buildings deformed by the melt epidemic. The mulch resembles a slum and is inhabited by the poor. The rich, powerful and almost immortal live in the canopy. Against their boredom, they hunt down isolated mulch dwellers and call it the big game . By chance, Cahuella becomes her next victim, but can be saved by Zebra .

In addition to the hunt for Reivich, he is now also on the search for the origins of the fashion drug Traumfeuer , which preserves immortality and protects against the melt epidemic . He gets into the depths of the city, where Marco Ferris , the founder of Chasm City , found a maggot that had crashed with her spaceship on the run from the machine beings centuries ago and has been torturing her since then so that it secretes the red liquid that makes him immortal . This liquid is also the basis for dream fires . The melt epidemic also comes from the maggot, which has possibly been carrying the pathogen for thousands of years and has used the red liquid as antigens for just as long.

In the Habitat Refugium , Cahuella finally meets Reivich, but also Tanner, who was believed to be dead . Reivich pretends to have transferred his soul to a computer architecture using the process called transmigration and thus to have become immortal. In the showdown, Tanner stabs Reivich to death , but is then killed by a bite by Cahuella . Six years later, Cahuell has become a successful businessman and recruits a female killer for the sequel to the Big Game, called the Shadow . This is probably Ana Khouri , one of the central characters in the novel Infinity .

subjects

Although technically advanced from today's perspective, all three levels of action are subject to regression. On the Santiago , the technology has remained at the same level as when the voyage began and is only sparsely enhanced by information from home. Above all, the hostility between the crews hinders the exchange of experience, medicines and spare parts, so that machines increasingly fail and people die from injuries that can actually be treated. At Sky's Edge , industrial resources are mainly subject to armaments and modern technology can only be obtained at high prices from ultra- ships. However, this regression is greatest in Chasm City . The entire nanotechnology is destroyed by the melt epidemic and the standard of living of the earlier Belle Epoque can hardly be imagined.

Immortality or greatly extended life and its influence on personal identity is also discussed several times. When Sky learns that he is one of the genetically engineered immortal passengers, he sees his claim to power over the mortal crew confirmed and develops his plan to take command. In Chasm City , the citizens of the canopy can almost make up for their previous life-extending measures through the dream fire . However, many of these citizens develop the need to put themselves in danger in order to reassure themselves of the value of life again and again through the impending death. Encounters with very old individuals such as the maggots, Marco Ferris or Sky Haussmann and their experiences from past epochs make the significance of individual acts seem small and insignificant. This becomes clear even for the ability of mankind to travel between the star systems, when the maggot reports of the flight of many highly developed races from the mechanical beings over millions of years .

The typical contrast between good and bad is also pronounced in this novel. However, it is viewed in a differentiated manner. The personal motives for selfish and often destructive action are traced back to traumatic experiences, lack of alternatives or even ignorance. The conflict between good and bad culminates in Tanner Mirabel when he realizes that he is identical to the immoral characters Cahuella and Sky Haussmann .

Reviews

" Chasm City is a thick book which was designed to be thick. It is a book which is full of onions. In the end, it's a joy. "

- John Clute : Scifi.com

expenditure

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Clute at Scifi.com