Elysium Fire

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By Alastair Reynolds

Read by John Lee

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Elysium Fire is a smoldering tale of murderers, secret cultists, tampered memories, and unthinkable power, of bottomless corruption and overpowering idealism from the king of modern space opera.

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.

Genre:

  • "This novel's ideas are mind-stretching, including a limbo where copies of the dead can be kept and interrogated, and a chillingly mischievous AI that tempts and mocks Dreyfus. The big concepts and complex story effectively pull readers into intriguing speculation about human identity and potential."
    Publishers Weekly
  • "Reynolds combines depth in characterization and dazzling hard-science applications to keep the reader turning pages."
    Booklist
  • "Elysium Fire is a tremendously assured read, a fast-paced page-turner that delivers a well thought out story and characters you'll come to care about."
    The Guardian (UK)
  • "A swashbuckling thriller--Pirates of the Caribbean meets Firefly--that nevertheless combines the author's trademark hard SF with effective, coming-of-age characterization."
    The Guardian on Revenger
  • "Revenger is classic Reynolds-that is to say, top of the line science fiction, where characters are matched beautifully with ideas and have to find their place in a complex future. More!"
    Greg Bear on Revenger
  • "A leading light of the new British space opera."
    Los Angeles Review of Books on Alastair Reynolds
  • "One of the giants of the new British space opera."
    io9 on Alastair Reynolds
  • "[Reynolds is] a mastersinger of the space opera."
    The Times (UK) on Blue Remembered Earth
  • "Heir to writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Reynolds keeps up the tradition of forward thinking... An immensely thrilling, mind-bending piece of work."
    AV Club on House of Suns
  • "[Reynolds] is the most gifted hard SF writers working today."
    Publishers Weekly on Beyond the Aquila Rift

On Sale
Jan 23, 2018
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781478947851

Alastair Reynolds

About the Author

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St. Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy. He stopped working as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency to become a full-time writer. Revelation Space and Pushing Ice were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Revelation Space, Absolution Gap, Diamond Dogs, and CenturyRain were shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award, and Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award.

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