Revenger lives up to its name and its characters have good reason to be seeking revenge. It’s also got a great vocabulary of not-quite-real words for the reader to parse through and work out as the story progresses. It never explains them fully, just uses them in context like real speakers who already know them would and is remarkably consistent with it.

The story in this book is also very well contained, while also leaving you a bunch of tidbits to ponder over about the wider world. I see now where the next book is going to go, but it still had a satisfying ending to this one.

The sense of a people who live in the ruins of high-technology society that they no longer understand is a good one. It’s believable that they’re not able to piece together how things work, and there are some fun nods to readers about the underlying science that they’ve lost.

And another great fundamental consideration that I kept coming back to throughout the book: I’m not sure whether the characters are human.

Revenger

By Alastair Reynolds

See on Storygraph

See on Goodreads

20

/

16

Reference links: Why I like Storygraph, My concerns with Goodreads, How my scoring system works