Elysium Fire

Written by Alastair Reynolds

Narrated by John Lee

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Jan 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781478947851

Alastair Reynolds

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. Alastair's books include the Revelation Space novels and Permafrost.

Reviews for Elysium Fire

[dpappas_25 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was the best book that I've read in a while. This isn't normally what I'm used to reading but I thought I'd take a chance on it. I was sucked into to story from the beginning and didn't want it to end. This story follows quite a few different characters and at times does jump from present to past. I don't really want to give anything away but I will say that there are mysterious deaths throughout the book that really drive these characters to try and solve the mystery behind the deaths. I enjoyed the reveal of information towards the end of the book. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the galley.

[fhudnell-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ten thousand orbiting artificial worlds comprise the Glitter Band with its one hundred million inhabitants. They are democracies and their citizens are constantly voting and responding to polls via neural implants. There is a very low crime rate so a small independent body of prefects was created to police the Glitter Band. The prefects, who reside on Panoply, are currently facing several problems. Confidence in the prefects is waning, a few habitats are succeeding from the Glitter Band (encouraged by the rabble rouser Julius Devin Garlin Voi) and some citizens are dying due to neural implant failure. Prefect Tom Dreyfus is trying to solve the problem of the mysterious deaths while keeping the population from finding out about what may be an epidemic. I haven't read either the first book in this science fiction detective series featuring Dreyfus or anything else by this author, so I'm sure I missed some details of the world and history of Yellowstone and its orbiting Glitter Band, but I still managed to follow the story in this book (until the ending which I found very confusing and had to read twice). I really liked the worldbuilding in this book, although I didn't get much of an idea of what life is like in the Glitter Band for most of the citizens. Some people can conjure objects, animals and even elaborate locales from quickmatter. One of the prefects is a hyperpig. The prefects are armed with whiphounds, autonomous robot whips that can be used to enforce, detain and gather evidence. People are dressed by clotheswalls : "...she stepped through a clotheswall , the wall forming her uniform around her...". One of the characters is a godlike artificial intelligence named Aurora who keeps out-maneuvering Dreyfus. I enjoyed this book for its worIdbuilding and complex plot and some of the characters were interesting, although Dreyfus was probably the least interesting one. I did find the book was too long. There is a vote tampering side story that didn't really go anywhere. The author also has a habit of explaining things three or four times. However, I will probably read more by this author.I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

There's nothing new about the world so the only thing that can sell this book are the characters and plot. Characters are returning ones and the plot is weak. The problem is the characters somehow became exaggerations. The hyperpig with a chip on his shoulder, matron police chief, grizzled Dreyfus and miss perfect policewoman. Not that they were nuanced in Prefect but that had the world building to save it. The characters make it impossible to care about the slow fizzle of a plot.

[santhony_35 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This science fiction work is the direst sequel to The Prefect (subsequently republished and sold under the name Aurora Rising), which are themselves prequels to the books of the Revelation Space collection of books. As such, they are set in the same universe, and some familiarity with the setting, while not absolutely necessary, is nevertheless highly recommended.The setting is the Yellowstone system, prior to the Melding Plague and immediately after the events in The Prefect (Aurora Rising), in which an alpha level artificial intelligence seeks dominion over the Glitter Band. Senior Prefect Dreyfus, along with the law enforcement agency, Panoply, is faced with a puzzling outbreak of fatal, neural implant malfunctions, which threatens to spread throughout the Glitter Band. The hard science fiction in all of Reynold’s work is top class. The dialogue, however, suffers from being non-realistic, to, at times, rather silly. Nevertheless, all of the works I’ve read centered on the Revelation Space universe have been well worth the effort.

[iansales_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a belated follow-on to 2007’s The Prefect – now re-titled Aurora Rising – and while the story is standalone, it makes several references to the events of the previous novel. And uses pretty much the same cast. A figure pops up giving speeches suggesting the various habitats of the Glitter Band should leave the Panoply, which is the implant-driven direct democracy system the habitats have been using for a couple of centuries. Reynolds is not being very subtle here – it’s clear what he’s writing about. But, there’s this universe hanging over the story, all that world-building documented in a dozen or so other novels… The main plot seems to be people whose implants suddenly boil their brains and kill them, and the Panoply – also a police force – is desperately trying to track down the cause and so prevent further deaths. Of course, the two – Glexiteer and brain-boiling implants – are connected, but only because Reynolds apparently has so little faith in democracy he built a backdoor into the “demarchy” he invented for his novels, so that a powerful elite can alter the outcome of certain votes (which does sort of plug into all the conspiracy theories regarding the 2016 Referendum). Anyway, the two are indeed linked, and through the aforementioned backdoor, which all feels somewhat too convenient when the climax hits. Some nice set-pieces, but story feels like two plots bolted together and the villains are somewhat pantomime.

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The authorities in the Glitter Band are starting to worry; there one was death a couple of weeks ago that they have not be able to explain. Last week there were two more. This week there have been four. No one has been able to explain why, and the information that they have tried to elicit from the corpses themselves hasn't given any leads. The implants that link each citizen to each other and the state in a fluid form of democracy where citizens are consulted and vote on matters small and large, have gone rogue and killed their hosts. Are these just random failings of the implants, which is unheard of, or is there someone out there causing them to fail? Panoply realises that they have a problem on their hands, one that seems to be growing exponentially and they have no idea who will be next to die.

The secrecy surrounding the deaths is high as they cannot risk society finding out that there is a killer on the loose. Inspector Dreyfus is brought urgently up to speed on the cases so far and those that are happening as the investigation tries to develop leads. To add to their woes, Devon Garlin, a member of the elite from Chasm City, is raising the political game by questioning the authority of the prefects and society with the aim of driving wedges between the habitats; somehow he seems to know about the mysterious deaths of the people too. What was a worrying situation is fast getting out of control...

Set in the Revelation Space universe this is a fast-paced sci-fi detective thriller is full of twists and turns and Dreyfus and his team try to work out who is doing the killing. The tech in the futuristic world is quite spectacular and Reynolds still manages to make it sound completely plausible. The secrets are revealed a little bit at a time as the story races to its fairly dramatic conclusion. However, it did feel like the ending unravelled a little too much rather than being neatly terminated, but that might be because there is more to come in a subsequent book; I hope so. Another stunning book from one of the masters of science fiction.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this SF mystery/space opera, but not so much the backstory portions. In the former the action moved well, the irritations were of the current really annoying type, the characters made sense in their rolls and actions. Because I haven't read any of the earlier books in the story I felt a lack of appreciation for the hyperpig character. The final wrap up felt way too tidy for me. The backstory could have been condensed a good deal if not mostly omitted, but did give depth to the villain.

[jeffe.legge · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I read about 100 pages and found it slow and difficult to understand.

[reading_fox · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Written ten or so years later, it's set only two years after the Prefect, and chronologically still far before Chasm city, but with space for yet more books between the two. Someone is stirring up trouble in the Glitterband, 8 habitats (out of 10000 or so) have democratically elected to remove themselves from the consensus, in part unhappy about the Panoply's treatment of them and response to the AI crisis. So far it's no more than making speeches, which of course he is perfectly entitled to do, but when speeches become mobs, and mobs start infringing on the sacrosanct polling cores, then the Prefects have to do something - but it's a delicate balance because too much force will lead to cries of heavy-handedness, but doing nothing will be worse.