Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds

(Gollancz, 2024)

Reviewed by Ben Jeapes

This is the third in a trilogy of the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies, which began with The Prefect (2007), followed by Elysium Rising (2018). We are in the Revelation Space universe and specifically in the Glitter Band: a belle epoque high point of civilisation, 10,000 habitats and 100 million lives in the orbit of Yellowstone under the ruthlessly benevolent eye of the Panoply organisation.

While each book has all the hallmarks of a normal police procedural, the implications are usually threatening to civilization. Panoply polices the machinery of democracy with, if necessary, lethal force, ensuring no one in the Glitter Band is denied the democratic rights guaranteed them under a set of Common Articles. Everyone is at perfect liberty not to exploit their rights, but Panoply makes sure those rights are there to be exploited if they desire. Any other human rights are fair game: the logic is that if someone chooses to be oppressed it is their choice, as long as they are not being coerced.

The Prefect introduced the organisation and its eponymous hero, Tom Dreyfus. However, that book was renamed Aurora Rising in 2017 as Reynolds perhaps realised who the main players would be of the series. Everything is seen through the lens of human activity but the three books are ultimately about the clash of two extremely non-human machine intelligences, Aurora and the Clockmaker. One is sadistic and anti-life, the other merely megalomaniacal, and both have a strange attachment to Dreyfus. As long as they are equally balanced then they tend not to bother anyone, but Dreyfus learns that someone, somewhere is running an illegal program to try and contain them. This would be safe if it contained them equally, but if it allowed one to gain the upper hand then no one benefits.

However, all Panoply knows at first is that there is an escalating series of terrorist attacks on the various habitats. And while they are coping with that, Prefect Ingvar Tench visits a watchlisted habitat, which is so much at the extreme limits of Panoply’s toleration that a solo visit by a Prefect is practically a suicide measure. Was that Tench’s intention? Panoply is torn between yes and no; the readers however know that she went there in good faith. Somehow, someone is able to dig deep into Panoply’s systems and reprogram them so that it doesn’t even know what is real. Panoply is in more trouble than it realises.

Reynolds’ real triumph is the way that the stark and unforgiving environment of the Glitter Band contrasts with the humanity of its inhabitants and emphasises the human values they live by. How they love, how they fear, how they hate. Dreyfus himself is feeling old and frayed. The human habit of conferring guilt on the living for the sins of their ancestors is still alive and well, and the characters must adjust to the death of a well-liked character who has made it through the previous books unscathed. Both the Clockmaker and Aurora arose from the minds of human beings and, who knows? Deep inside the infinite pit of algorithms there may be some vestige still of the person they once were.

Back in the outside world, Panoply comes to face up to its darkest day with courage and sacrifice. An escalating series of manifestations of Chekhov’s Law first provide glimmers of hope, as we start to see a way out of this, and then they hit us with an unexpected, emotional and most satisfying ending that pretty well guarantees this is the final Dreyfus Emergency.

But it may not be the last of the Glitter Band. We know it will one day become the Rust Belt, a devastated survivor of a nanotechnological plague. There is still no clue as to how that happens, so we might well be returning to Yellowstone.

Review from BSFA Review 24 - Download your copy here.