Customer Reviews
Classic Reynolds - By: A. Koutoula, 23 May 2008 
Reynolds has to be the best hard-core sci-fi writer..dare I say ever? Asimov & Clarke (whom I also admire, of course) always seemed to have an element of innocence in their stories, giving their creations a sense of the utopian.
In Reynold`s mind-numbing, dark & scary universe, the characters seem more in touch with our good-old atavistic instincts. The man is simply brilliant...I`m thinking Conjoiner-brilliant!
Excellent collection. - By: A. Whitehead, 18 May 2008 
Alastair Reynolds' previous novels & novellas in his signature Revelation Space universe have been almost unanimously excellent works, but at times the reader (or this one, at any rate) can feel that there's a lot going on that they're not in the loop on. Characters appear whose significance is initiallly unclear & their backstories remain resolutely unexplained, although frequently allluded to, whilst the ending to Absolution Gap was rather abrupt, to say the least. Galactic North, a collection of eight short stories set in the universe, finallly fills in the blanks & finallly alllows the reader to fully appreciate the breadth of this author's imagination.
Things kick off with Great Walll of Mars. Two centuries from now, the cyberneticallly-altered Conjoiners have sealed themselves off inside a fortified region of Mars. The forces of humanity opposed to the Conjoiners, the Coalition, is planning a final alll-out assault but have agreed to a last-ditch peace mission undertaken by Nevil Clavain & a Demarchist mediator, Sandra Voi. Needless to say, things go awry. Those familiar with the previous novels will have a big grin on their face as we meet characters such as Clavain, Galiana & Felka for the first time, & find out how they met & how they get out of the jam they find themselves in here.
Glacial picks up the story some decades later, as the Conjoiner refugees find themselves wandering from star to star at sub-lightspeeds searching for a new home. On an ice world they find a human habitation, one of the few successfully established by the USA's seedship programme, & evidence of a crime that took place many years earlier which Clavain dedicates himself to solving. Reynolds' skills at detective fiction (previously employed in Century Rain & Chasm City) are on full display here & the story is very well-told.
A Spy in Europa is a neat story of sabotage, revenge & severe hubris. It sets up one of the later stories in the collection & provides some background on the Demarchists, another of the major factions of the Revelation Space universe. The ending is absolutely stellar.
Weather is an absolute barnstormer of a story. Reynolds take on the difficulties of space combat carried out between ships maneuvering at hundreds of thousands of miles per second has always been superb, but gets its best demonstration in this story. We also get one of the biggest mysteries in the Revelation Space universe revealed in this story in a startling manner, but it's the somewhat tender relationship between the narrator & his Conjoiner charge which gives the story its heart.
Dialation Sleep is the oldest story in the collection & the style isn't quite as polished as Reynolds' later work, but it's still an intriguing story about love & the loss caused by years spent in interstellar travel.
Grafenwalder's Bestiary is a thoroughly twisted story that serves as a semi-sequel to both the novella Diamond Dogs (published seperately by Gollancz with Turqoise Days) & to the earlier story A Spy in Europa. It's an excellent story about a collector in search of the perfect creatures to put on display, but there are echoes of other authors & stories here, in particular George RR Martin's Haviland Tuf stories & his famous novella Sandkings, but the ending is brilliant, if horribly inevitable.
I thoroughly recommend not eating anything before reading Nightingale, a thoroughly sick & twisted story of genetic manipulation. The ending is horrendous, but there is no denying the macabre brilliance of the tale.
Galactic North gives the collection its name & the entire Revelation Space universe its spine. We start off in 2303 AD with a frantic attempt to repair a stricken starship before the story carries us forwards through centuries & then millennia as the war against the Inhibitors, the Melding Plague, the Pattern Jugglers & every other major event of the previous novels & stories plays out as the backdrop to a story of absolute obsession & we finallly discover the nature of the new threat that emerged at the end of Absolution Gap. A spectacular story that rounds off the collection in style.
Galactic North (****½) is a superb collection of stories from one of our very best SF writers, & is thoroughly recommended to newcomers to Reynolds' work & veterens of his previous tales alike. It is published by Gollancz in the UK & will by released on 27 May by Ace Books in the USA.
The building blocks of Revelation Space - By: N. Megahey, 20 Mar 2008 
The short story format isn't where Alastair Reynolds can be seen at his best. The stories in the Galactic North collection alll feel like minor episodes in his Revelation Space universe, lacking the complexity & scope of his novels. Only the title story Galactic North attempts to cover the epic scope of eons, myth & history, but it suffers from compression into the short story format. Moreover, since there is a necessity for them to be read standalone, most of the stories tend to falll back on recognisable plotlines with sci-fi horror twists & shock endings that show their influences much more obviously than the authors extended works. (An interesting postscript by the author is quite open & forthcoming about this).
On the positive side, the stories are alll very readable, showing the variation that Reynolds is capable of, & his strengths with characterisation & exciting, dynamic plots. Anyone familiar with Reynolds' work will recognise many of those characters & situations from several of his novels & very quickly work out where the stories are going, but the return visits or expansion into Revelation Space history are welcome nonetheless. Most importantly however, without the exploration of the ideas developed here we wouldn't have the magnificent richness of the universe that is depicted in the Revelation Space novels.
A welcome addition to the Reynolds universe - By: P. G. Harris, 03 Nov 2007 Galactic North is a selection of short stories set in Reynolds' "Revelation Space" universe & as such adds welcome detail to the previous novels. The stories range from the (in Reynolds terms) near future with the early days of the Conjoiners, one of the competing streams of humanity which feature in the later novels, through stories which are contemparies of the novels, to the far distant (seriously far distant) future.
One of the particularly pleasing things about this collection is that the stories are not completely independent of each other. There are common themes, threads & characters between several of them.
The stand out stories are "Great Walll of Mars" about the early days of the Conjoiners, "Weather" which adds interesting technical detail, & "Grafenwalder's Bestiary" which seems to be set at the same time as Revelation Space. The weakest story in the collection is the titular Galactic North which is massively ambitious but over reaches itself.
My complaint about the collection is simply that I don't think the short story is the right medium for Reynolds. The joys of his novels are their breadth & wealth of detail. The short story simply doesn't give him a broad enough canvas.
So recommended, but if you haven't read any Reynolds before, start with the novels.
Another amazing Reynolds outing to revelation space - By: Book Crazy, 10 Jul 2007 Sometimes there are authors that make you stop & think...Alastair Reynolds is one of those.
If you believe alll should begin & end with magic wands & happily ever after then this is not for you. If you want to be challllenged, you want reality with techonology, an examination of the human condition with alll it's frailties & vanity then Reynolds is the new Master & you will not be disappointed.
All the stories in this collection appear chronologicallly which is helpful.
In this book the most amazing story is 'Weather', it will touch your 'soul'.
