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Elysium Fire: 2 (The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies) Paperback – 23 Jan. 2018

by Reynolds Alastair (Author)

4.4 3,181 ratings

Book 2 of 3: The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies

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Elysium Fire is a smoldering tale of murderers, secret cultists, tampered memories, and unthinkable power, of bottomless corruption and overpowering idealism from the king of modern space opera.

Ten thousand city-state habitats orbit the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise.

But even utopia needs a police force. For the citizens of the Glitter Band that organization is Panoply, and the prefects are its operatives.

Prefect Tom Dreyfus has a new emergency on his hands. Across the habitats and their hundred million citizens, people are dying suddenly and randomly, victims of a bizarre and unprecedented malfunction of their neural implants. And these "melters" leave no clues behind as to the cause of their deaths. . .

As panic rises in the populace, a charismatic figure is sowing insurrection, convincing a small but growing number of habitats to break away from the Glitter Band and form their own independent colonies.

Book 2 of 3

The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies
Length

432
Pages
Language

EN
English
Publisher

Orbit
Publication date

2018
January 23
Dimensions

15.2 x 2.9 x 23.5
cm
ISBN-10

9780316555678
ISBN-13

978-0316555678
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Product description

Review

"Elysium Fire is a tremendously assured read, a fast-paced page-turner that delivers a well thought out story and characters you'll come to care about."--The Guardian (UK)

"Revenger is classic Reynolds-that is to say, top of the line science fiction, where characters are matched beautifully with ideas and have to find their place in a complex future. More!"--Greg Bear on Revenger

"[Reynolds is] a mastersinger of the space opera."
--The Times (UK) on Blue Remembered Earth

"[Reynolds] is the most gifted hard SF writers working today."
--Publishers Weekly on Beyond the Aquila Rift

"A leading light of the new British space opera."
--Los Angeles Review of Books on Alastair Reynolds

"A swashbuckling thriller--Pirates of the Caribbean meets Firefly--that nevertheless combines the author's trademark hard SF with effective, coming-of-age characterization."--The Guardian on Revenger

"Heir to writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Reynolds keeps up the tradition of forward thinking... An immensely thrilling, mind-bending piece of work."
--AV Club on House of Suns

"One of the giants of the new British space opera."
--io9 on Alastair Reynolds

"Reynolds combines depth in characterization and dazzling hard-science applications to keep the reader turning pages."--Booklist

"This novel's ideas are mind-stretching, including a limbo where copies of the dead can be kept and interrogated, and a chillingly mischievous AI that tempts and mocks Dreyfus. The big concepts and complex story effectively pull readers into intriguing speculation about human identity and potential."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St. Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy. he stopped working as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency to become a full-time writer. Revelation Space and Pushing Ice were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Revelation Space, Absolution Gap, Diamond Dogs, and Century Rain were shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award, and Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0316555673
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Orbit; 1st edition (23 Jan. 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780316555678
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316555678
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 2.86 x 23.5 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 977,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 3,839 in Colonisation
- 5,309 in Space Exploration
- 8,212 in First Contact

Customer reviews:
4.4 3,181 ratings

About the author

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Alastair Reynolds

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Alastair Reynolds was born in Wales in 1966. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy. From 1991 until 2007, he lived in The Netherlands, where he was employed by The European Space Agency as an astrophysicist. He is now a full-time writer.

Photo by Robert Day [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Excellent detective fiction, excellent SF, excellent story telling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 February 2018

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Elysium Fire is a novel set in Alastair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” Universe. It takes place in the “Golden Era” of human colonisation of space. Chasm City on the planet of Yellowstone is the greatest metropolis ever built. In the space above, the Glitter Band is made of thousands of satellite habitats. This orbital society is governed by a perfect democracy where all decisions are taken by referendum enabled by implants carried in all citizens’ heads.
This is a sequel to Reynolds’ 2007 novel, the Prefect, now renamed Aurora Rising and features the same central character, Inspector Dreyfus of Panoply, the small consensual security force protecting the Glitter Band.
A wave of mysterious deaths has started to strike at random, and appears to be increasing exponentially. Panoply is racing to find the cause before panic sets in, threatening the cohesion of society. Their task is complicated by a populist agitator, seeking to encourage individual habitats to withdraw from the federal society binding them together. A separatist, who is also vastly wealthy while pretending to be a man of the people, is a clear pointer to this being part a growing thread of post-Brexit, post-Trump SF.
It is also, like Christopher Brookmyre’s recent Places in the Darkness, a very successful combination of genres. The background is a piece of excellent SF. The foreground is a top notch detective story.
Overall, Elysium Rising is a highly satisfying piece of work. It is well plotted with a tight, internally consistent narrative. It does what all good SF does. It creates a highly fantastical, speculative scenario, but then populates in with very human, credible characters.
While Reynolds’ recent Poseidon’s Children sequence were entertaining enough, his strengths lie in this darker, almost gothic universe.

8 people found this helpful

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Anna

Has this book been censored or what? (may contain spoilers)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 July 2023

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It was great to read another book exploring the world from the Revelation Space, even though that world looked less inviting than before (also this whole premise of a single communication hub per world is not how these things are done even now, where is N+1 reliability?)

However, it looked odd that the narrative only lightly touched a few key moments, instead of actually describing them and giving the story more substance.

For example, it has been left to the reader's guess what exactly happened to the children during their time with Ursas, even though that could have easily become a separate book in its own right, what the wager participants felt about it, why they felt compelled to undergo treatments in the Elysium Heights clinic afterwards and how they felt about them.

I wonder if this happened due to late-stage edits to make the book less "lighter" before publishing it. If so, I wish there was an option to access director's cut of the story.

One person found this helpful

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Simon A

Sleuthing Through The Glitter Band

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 March 2018

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The Revelation Space series is one of my favourite sci fi series. This is not the best in the series, but if you enjoyed the prequel to this sub series - The Prefect / Aurora Rising - you will probably enjoy this.

In some ways its just a detective story, but the context of the Revelation Space universe gives it an interesting twist. The ending itself is not entirely surprising, but satisfying nonetheless.

I would love Mr Reynolds to revive some of the edgier themes in this series - civilisation limiting, the ultras etc, but would certainly be content with another in the Dreyfus series.

2 people found this helpful

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William Donelson

I very much enjoyed this return to the Glitter Band, before the melding plague turns it into The Rust Belt

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 January 2018

Verified Purchase

If it's been more than a year since you've read The Prefect (2007), you might enjoy reading it again before starting this one. It's not an absolute requirement, but it would make Elysium Fire more enjoyable.

I very much enjoyed this return to the Glitter Band, before the melding plague turns it into The Rust Belt. Tom Dreyfus is much as he was before, a bit more worn, a bit more careful. Sparver and Ng and Aumonier and others reappear, and have grown as well.

The plot starts out at a great pace, with two interwoven story threads: The current emergency, and a tale of two teens from 30 years or so before the current action. Perhaps you might think you have solved the central mystery at some point in the book (but you haven't), and the pieces of the puzzle are presented well in succession, gradually building a picture of the crime and it's origins.

By 3/4 of the way through the book, you realise that the ending is going to be more complex in it's origins than you might have first thought. The ending itself is a bit flat, a bit rushed, with an info-dump a la Agatha Christie summations - not my favourite way to come to a solution in a mystery.

As always, Reynolds' prose and plotting are good, his technology is wonderful, and the characters are interesting and sympathetic.

This is a grand addition to the Revelation Space we all love from Reynolds. 4.5-stars, minus 0.5 for the somewhat flat ending.

Notes and quotes:

Yet there was something different about it today –a kind of pearly glimmer to its details, an inherent lack of focus, as if he saw it through tear-stained eyes. Fine, glinting threads seemed to bind its elements, as if a spider had been crawling around it overnight, trying to fix a web to its endlessly shifting geometry.

A tale of hereditary power, of arrogance in the face of the inevitability of human flaws, of the hubris of kings, of the futile denial of entropy itself.

That was the trouble with having a gift, though –however fairly or unfairly it had been acquired. Sooner or later one felt obliged to use it.

11 people found this helpful

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Elysium Fire: 2 (The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies) Paperback – 23 Jan. 2018

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