Books like Revelation Space
What should you read after Alastair Reynolds’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Alastair Reynolds
- 2000
- Hard space opera
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Revelation Space
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchBlindsight
Peter Watts
The other great modern answer to why nobody is broadcasting: first contact with something intelligent and definitively not conscious, crewed by people barely human themselves.
- Why the galaxy is silent
- Body modification pushed too far
- Characters with hidden agendas
- Reads like a neuroscience paper
Great matchConsider Phlebas
Iain M. Banks
Banks's opening move on the Culture: enormous structures, a war between two incompatible ways of being, and a protagonist stuck on the losing side of history.
- Characters with hidden agendas
- Gothic decaying starships
- Episodic and uneven throughout
Best for the deep timeHyperion
Dan Simmons
Ancient artefacts moving backwards through time, a menace nobody can explain, and a structure that keeps handing you a new voice. The closest cousin to Reynolds in mood.
- Deep time and dead civilisations
- Why the galaxy is silent
- Archaeology as detective work
- No conclusion in volume one
Great matchAncillary Justice
Ann Leckie
For the hidden-agenda pleasure: everyone in the Radch is running an operation, the empire included against itself, and the narrator is what remains of a warship.
- Characters with hidden agendas
- Body modification pushed too far
- Slower, talkier, more elliptical
Great matchAltered Carbon
Richard K. Morgan
Bodies as replaceable hardware, taken to a thoroughly unpleasant conclusion and wrapped around a murder case that moves a great deal faster than Reynolds ever does.
- Body modification pushed too far
- Archaeology as detective work
- Graphic torture and sex
Best for the readable versionLeviathan Wakes
James S.A. Corey
Corey take Reynolds's ingredients — an unknowable alien substance, a detective, mostly honest physics — and make them go down easily. A palate cleanser that isn't a downgrade.
- No faster-than-light cheating
- Archaeology as detective work
- Why the galaxy is silent
- Solar system only, no deep time
Great matchNeuromancer
William Gibson
The style Reynolds's gothic owes something to: decayed technology, hidden principals pulling the strings, and people who have modified themselves past recognition.
- Body modification pushed too far
- Characters with hidden agendas
- Earthbound and near-future
Great matchElysium Fire
Reynolds's own return to the Glitter Band: a Prefect running a homicide investigation through ten thousand habitats, with his usual taste for institutions rotting from inside.
- Archaeology as detective work
- Gothic decaying starships
- Author and ISBN missing from our record
Worth a look — with a warningThe Quantum Thief
Hannu Rajaniemi
Post-human identity games at Reynolds's level of difficulty and then some: a heist told in a vocabulary the book flatly refuses to define for you.
- Body modification pushed too far
- Characters with hidden agendas
- Explains nothing for 100 pages
Worth a look — with a warningPerdido Street Station
China Miéville
Here for the gothic: a rotting city, appalling body modification, and an intelligence nobody can fight on its own terms. It is fantasy, and it will not apologise.
- Body modification pushed too far
- Gothic decaying starships
- Fantasy, not SF at all
Great matchPandora's Star
Peter F. Hamilton
A star vanishing behind an artificial shell, and a thousand pages spent working out who built it and why. The same appetite for a cosmic question answered with real machinery.
- Why the galaxy is silent
- Deep time and dead civilisations
- Archaeology as detective work
- Needs its 1,100-page sequel
What should you read after Revelation Space?
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Blindsight by Peter Watts — the other great modern answer to why nobody is broadcasting: first contact with something intelligent and definitively not conscious, crewed by people barely human themselves.
If what stayed with you was characters with hidden agendas, read Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks instead: banks's opening move on the Culture: enormous structures, a war between two incompatible ways of being, and a protagonist stuck on the losing side of history. Hyperion by Dan Simmons is the other strong option — ancient artefacts moving backwards through time, a menace nobody can explain, and a structure that keeps handing you a new voice. The closest cousin to Reynolds in mood.
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