Second paragraph of third chapter:

I jumped, not having heard anyone’s footsteps on the staircase which led up to the observation deck. I’d assumed I was completely alone. All the other passengers had retired to their rooms immediately upon boarding – the journey just long enough to justify unpacking their luggage – but I had gone up onto the observation deck to watch our departure. I had a room, but nothing that I needed to unpack.

When I first read this in 2011, I wrote:

A long time ago I read Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and rather bounced off it; perhaps, in retrospect, it was because I read it towards the end of a long work trip and simply wasn’t in the mood. Since then, the recommendations of friends and also amicable encounters with Reynolds himself at a couple of sf cons persuaded me to give him another try, and I was not disappointed.

Chasm City starts as a space operatic story of the central character pursuing a grudge against an old enemy in the eponymous city, while also suffering flashbacks to the memory of a notorious early colonist. But it develops into a gritty examination of memory, identity and shared pain in a future society. (Fortuitously I was also reading Justin Richards' Doctor Who novel Demontage, which features a differently disturbed and disturbing future urban environment, at the same time.) It kept me reading, and has converted me to Reynolds, whose style is reminiscent of Banks but calmer.

I may even give Revelation Space another try.

I confess that I have not yet given Revelation Space another try, and I also found Chasm City tougher going this time round – partly because I was reading it as the BSFA Best Novel winner in the same year as The Kappa Child and Bold As Love won the Tiptree and Clarke awards, and it's almost as long as the two of them combined. (The longest book I have read so far this year, though I'm now in the middle of Foucault's Pendulum.) There are basically two novels here with the two plot strands more or less connected and some nice working of overlapping identities; there's some good colour to the setting as well. On rereading, I liked it but was not wowed. You can get it here.

The other BSFA contenders that year were three books that I have read – American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones (which won the Clarke Award) and Pashazade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood – and two that I haven't, Lust by Geoff Ryman and The Secret of Life by Paul McAuley (also shortlisted for the Clarke Award). I'm glad that BSFA voters were not sucked into the awe for American Gods that afflicted Hugo and Nebula voters that year, but my own vote would certainly have been for Pashazade. Reynolds is hugely nice in person, and I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him, which cannot have harmed his chances with the BSFA voters.

Next in this sequence will be the winners of the Tiptree, Clarke and BSFA Best Novel awards from 2002, for work published in 2001: "Stories for Men", by John Kessel, Light by M. John Harrison and The Separation by Christopher Priest, rereads in all three cases.