Tom D refuse is a high-ranking prefect, a sort of policeman whose job it is to enforce the accords between the inhabitants of the glitter.

Reynolds achieves a masterful blend of mystery/police procedural, hard sci-fi, intrigue and action, all within the fascinating far future world of a distributed and loosely federated human civilization often barely recognizable as such due to radical genetic and/or cybernetic engineering. I started off publishing short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone in the early 90s, then eventually branched into novels.

But 'cop' is not the correct term – it's more like they are the public safety monitors, trying to deal with any issues with a light touch but willing to bring in the heavy support as needed. The plot and the action are so dense and convoluted that I'm not sure whether some of the plot lines were resolved.

Rogue Artificial Intelligence; genetic engineering; cloning; post-humanism; hubristic families; found (or orchestrated) family; all of these themes are essentially and magnificently interwoven, and always, always, the overweening theme is Doing the Right Thing. I guess the first thing to note is that this book is set in a broad and encompassing universe that Alistair Reynolds has created.They're present here, but I think for first time Reynolds has a scene where he acknowledges and intervenes with the identity issues because he knows you're speculating about the identity of a character. Yet Reynolds makes every action Dreyfus and the others take flow from the people they are so that we get a rich sense of what they’re like. Machine Vendetta" has everything: adults with the size and mental development of babies; bombed monasteries; secret cults secretly building a computer to trap two near-gods; upgraded pigs and lemurs: a mysterious mansion on a deserted asteroid; a 100 page section of non-stop action; two competing evil near omnipotent A I upgrades; long-lived interstellar posts human traders and their miles long ships; the list goes on.