Two aspects of this book have provoked immediate comment: a colleague saw Terminal World sat on my desk and commented on the bleak title. Bleak, of course, is what Reynolds does as well as anyone in the SF sphere – entropy, decay, decline and annihilation are his stock in trade. The second aspect was the choice of Bernard Cornwell to provide the jacket blurb – the doyen of historical fiction, bigging up hard SF? It makes perfect sense, when you think about it – Reynolds’ fans will buy this book anyway, but praise from an unexpected direction may attract new readers who have not even considered science fiction. If they do pick it up, this is not a bad book for them to cut their teeth on.

Terminal World eschews space travel completely for the declining dystopia that we presume to be a far-future Earth. Society is fragmented, with Mad Max-like tribes battering against the walls of what’s left of civilisation: Spearpoint, the last human city. Spearpoint is far from united, though – the monstrous spire, so clearly illustrated on the cover of the book, is home to millions of people, from the low-tech denizens of Horsetown at its base to the Angels who inhabit the Celestial Levels at its zenith. This technological apartheid is not merely a function of society or a metaphor for how things are on our own Earth: it’s determined by the zones, interlocking areas in which the maximum complexity that can be achieved by technology is different – take an electrical device from a higher to a lower zone and it will be broken, forever. Humans can move between the zones with the aid of special medicines, and to the inhabitants of Spearpoint and the rest of this world, the zones are just a fact of life, something to accept and cope with. They no more understand them than they have the ability to really understand the technologies they use – this is a fading society and a fading world.

The hero of the tale, Quillon, is an undercover angel working in one of the lower zones, Neon Heights. When his infiltration mission went wrong, he stayed on incognito, working as a doctor, but when he gets a message that certain angels know where he is and are coming for him, he must effect a plan to leave Spearpoint altogether. Aided by the swear-happy, gun-toting guide Meroka, he escapes the city, but they bounce from one mishap to another: Skullboys, Carnivorgs and then the Swarm, the really wonderful airship-based society that rescues them and, after a period of initial distrust, adopts them as part of its own social structure. The Swarm is like an aeronautical equivalent of Armada in Mievelle’s The Scar, and is the kind of thing I read speculative fiction for, but its days are numbered: around the time of Quillon’s rescue, a massive shift in the zones threw everything in to chaos, plunging Spearpoint in to darkness and drastically altering the effective topography of the world. Quillon believes that Nimcha, a girl he and Meroka rescued from the Skullboys, has the power to mend the zones, and champions the cause of taking her to Spearpoint. Swarm bends to his will, and a great rescue mission commences.

It’s a stirring story, with much less hard science than we are used to from Reynolds, and rattles along at a fair pace. There are some problems; characterisation has never been Reynolds’ strength, and while Meroka and some other supporting characters feel quite well drawn, Quillon himself lacks personality – the dichotomy between his scepticism and his fervent belief despite it that they must get to Spearpoint is never really reconciled, and there are also some storylines, such as factionalism within Swarm, and the angels themselves, that feel somewhat bolted on. Weaknesses aside, this is still a very enjoyable book, that blends an interesting fusion of genre tropes to good effect. The option for a sequel is left tantalisingly hanging, with just enough loose ends tied up to justify calling this a standalone novel, but plenty to explore if Reynolds does decide to take his story further. I for one hope he does.

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