Chasm City: Alastair Reynolds

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The Atoner: Captain John Brannigan. The only crime mentioned is that he overwrote the brain patterns of his first mate, and replaced them with his own brain patterns, effectively 'killing' the person as he was. It's implied he's done worse. The name of Roland Childe and his feverish attempts to decipher the secret of Blood Spire in Diamond Dogs is a reference to a verse from King Lear: " Child Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still 'Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man." From the depths of the gas plume at the heart of Chasm City, to the aristocratic canopy spanning what remains of the skyscrapers, Mirabel begins to unravel the mystery of the Melding Plague.

The Faceless: The shipmaster Queen Jasmina of the lighthugger Gnostic Ascension hides her true appearance by using the remote controlled clone bodies. There is a challenge though, and it's keeping up with the sweeping storylines that crisscross at many points within the story. Pay attention, and you won't be disappointed. reasonably well. It's another step towards what could become a very significant 21st century hard SF career. The first three short stories (G.W.o.M, Gl., A.S.i.E) introduce the Conjoiners and the Demarchists, two of the main human factions. Also introduced are the characters Clavain, Felka, Remontoire, and Galiana.

At the end of Absolution Gap, when it is revealed that the Inhibitors were defeated with the assistance of a mysterious alien race which had been hiding behind the scenes all along. Don't let H catch you in the act of police brutality, especially if you're already a Brain in a Jar. Deconstruction: A hard sci-fi decon of the Space Opera subgenre, with some liberal applying of Reconstruction here and there. For a start, there's no Casual Interstellar Travel at all and the author goes to great lenghts to examine the ramifications of this simple fact on the setting and personal fates of the characters (Khouri's tale being a prime example). The classic scifi trope of faster-than-light travel is only actually attempted once in the series, and it destroys the ship trying to use it.

The short stories are set all over the timeline. None of them are necessary to read the novels, even when the events of the novels follow those of the short story. A couple of short stories are sequels to the novels, and should be read afterwards. Psycho for Hire: Grelier in Absolution Gap and pretty much any less than sympathetic Ultranaut or bounty hunter in the series. Space Pirate: The Banshees pretty much fit the bill and are a thoroughly unromantic version of the trope. The Ultra(naut)s often have elements of this, but are not necessarily antagonistic.

Trash the Set: At the end of Galactic North, almost all terrestrial planets of the Milky Way were devoured by the Greenfly. Boring, but Practical: Spaceflight and space warfare in the series in general. Although the weapons and spacecraft involved are immensely powerful, they still have to deal with the immense distances and timeframes of sub-lightspeed interstellar travel, taking years (at the very least) to travel between stars. Implied in The Prefect Specifically, in relation to the nature of the Mademoiselle and the Melding Plague.

Death from Above: Threatened by Volyova in Revelation Space, who uses one of her ship's smallest weapons to devastating effect as a warning to the inhabitants of Resurgam. She also has access to teratonne-yield nukes and "hell class" weapons that could conceivably shatter worlds (and indeed do, on one occasion).Little Hero, Big War: To the point that in Absolution Gap, humanity largely isn't saved by their own efforts at all, but by the abovementioned Invisible Aliens deciding that the Inhibitors have finally become weak enough for them to reveal themselves and fight them. This is revealed in passing in the epilogue - not so much part of the story as just an incidental fact of how history played out—but see the note after Deus ex Machina above for an alternate view on that point. Forgotten Superweapon: The first Revelation Space novel features Powered Armor suits that are never mentioned in later books, though there are several stituations in which they would make a huge difference. Then again, they would likely have been destroyed/corrupted when the Melding Plague / The Captain took over the ship; this is plausible, since they also appear in Diamond Dogs, which is mostly set in the pre-Plague era.

Flying Car: The volantors of pre-plague Chasm City. Some examples appear directly in the opening chapter of Diamond Dogs.The Mademoiselle's beta-level sim in Ana Khouri's implants and probably Skade's too—not exactly a simple simulation. Fish People: Denizens are an engineered sentient species created on Europa by mixing human and fish genes. Hopeless War: War with the Inhibitors is definitely seemed like this trope to humanity and the countless alien species wiped by the Inhibitors previously. Later, Humanity defeated them offscreen with the help of the Nestbuilders. But accidentally they allowed a more powerful threat to rise in the form of the Greenfly. And war with the Greenfly became truly hopeless. The Scrimshaw Suit used by one of the ship's captains in Absolution Gap. You can't move and have no external sensory stimulous. It gets attached to the front of the ship and buried under tonnes of ice used to shield the ship from dust collisions when going at near light speed for the subjective years that interstellar travel takes. And it won't let you die. Or sleep.