Absolution Gap

Absolution Gap is a science fiction novel by the Welsh writer Alastair Reynolds, published in 2003, and it continues the future history he had begun in the Revelation Space books. It follows directly on from Redemption Ark.

The novel is told across four separate stretches of time, with the greater part of it set in the years 2675 and 2727. In the earlier strand, Queen Jasmina of the lighthugger Gnostic Ascension wakes a crew member named Quaiche out of reefersleep and tells him that his expeditions have yet to improve the ship's fortunes, so he is given one more chance and sent to survey the star 107 Piscium and its planets, with his lover Morwenna travelling beside him inside the scrimshaw suit, a device that paralyses and blinds whoever wears it. On a moon of a gas giant he names Haldora, he finds evidence of a structure built by something that was not human. Haldora itself appears to wink out of existence for fractions of a second at a time.

The other thread of the book belongs to the war against the Inhibitors. The veteran Clavain is among the survivors pushed into hiding by the first Inhibitor strike, and the group is running short of options when a visitor arrives claiming she can take them somewhere the machines will not follow. Reynolds had built the Revelation Space novels around a slow, hard-edged future history, and Absolution Gap sits at the late end of that sequence.