Revelation Space (The Inhibitor Trilogy Book 1)

by Alastair Reynolds

At least half the people Volyova saw were Ultranauts, evidenced by their tendency towards paleness, spindly build, flaunted body augmentations, swathes of black leather and acres of glinting jewellery, tattoos and trade-trophies.

Skyjacks—at least here—made up a significant portion of the others she saw. They were spacedwellers to be sure, but they did not crew interstellar ships and so their outlook was very different to the wraithlike Ultras,

Icecombers were a Skyjack offshoot; psychomodified for the extreme solitude which came from working the Kuiper belt zones, and they kept themselves to themselves with ferocious dedication.

Gillies were aquatically modified humans who breathed liquid air; capable of crewing short-range, high-gee ships: they constituted a sizeable fraction of the system’s police force. Some gillies were so incapable of normal respiration and locomotion that...

Conjoiners: descendants of an experimental clique on Mars who had systematically upgraded their minds, swapping cells for machines, until something sudden and drastic had happened. In one moment, they had escalated to a new mode of consciousness—what they called the Transenlightenment—precipitating a brief but nasty war in the process. Conjoiners were easy to pick out in crowds: recently they had bio-engineered huge and beautiful cr...

Other human factions—like the Demarchists, who had long allied themselves with the Conjoiners—were acutely aware that only Conjoiners knew how to bui...

In all that time there had been no response from the world; no hint that it was anything other than what it appeared to be. It just hung there, grey and sutured, like the cranium of a skull tipped in prayer.

It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.