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Exploring Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger Trilogy
Alastair Reynolds is an awesome writer of space opera, as long as you are ready to ardently dislike the protagonist.
While I would definitely class the Revenger trilogy as space opera, I can sum it up much more easily in a single line:
Pirates of the Caribbean. In SPAAAACE!
You are either completely there for this or you aren’t, and the latter is absolutely fine.
The Concept
The three books (Revenger, Shadow Captain and Bone Silence) are set in the kind of far future that might have echoes of certain works of Gene Wolfe.
The solar system has been destroyed and there are now millions of worlds encircling a fading, dying sun. (Don’t worry about the science. This is not a hard SF book by any means). People live on those worlds and travel between them on sunjammers, ships that sail the solar wind.
So, basically, this is how Reynolds puts the Caribbean in space. Except there are no continents, only islands. Islands that take different forms and have different cultures.
Worldbuilding wise it mostly locks, and it locks better once you have read to the end and got all the revelations, trust me. No spoilers, just trust me.