British author Alastair Reynolds (see "Science Fiction 101", Cosmos 14, p111) writes what is often known as the new space opera, darker and more pessimistic than traditional space opera. Reynolds' science is trustworthy: he has a PhD in astronomy, and has worked as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency.

About 500 years in the future, there are ten thousand orbital habitats in the Glitter Band, each set up to suit its citizens. A kind of pervasive virtual reality ('abstraction') allows for huge diversity in the ways people choose to live. Some have high levels of biomodification, and their version of local reality can be bizarre; some live in something close to baseline reality, but can still access abstraction through interfaces such as special glasses and communications bracelets.

Eccentric communities include the Voluntary Tyrannies, where people choose to live with no rights or freedoms, and a state whose citizens have most of their bodies amputated, and live as busts in glass cases, totally immersed in abstraction. Life in the Glitter Band is not totally utopian: most of the population hates and fears the transhumanist Ultras and the heavily modified Conjoiners, and there is prejudice against hyperpigs (pigs 'uplifted' to human status).

The Prefect is police action on a huge scale. The Prefects of the Panoply, whose job is to protect the important process of democratic voting, seem to be the closest thing there is to a galactic police force, though their powers are severely limited.

Gruff Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus and his loyal team – Sparver, a hyperpig, and Thalia Ng, the daughter of a disgraced former Prefect – are faced with what looks, at first, like simple polling fraud, but the fix that Thalia manually installs in four habitats has disastrous results. Meanwhile, an Ultra spaceship destroys a small Glitter Band habitat, apparently deliberately.

Dreyfus suspects that neither of these events is as straightforward as it seems – and that there's a connection somewhere. Secrets within secrets unravel, but Dreyfus' investigations are hampered at every move. Could there be a traitor within Panoply itself? Worse: does a powerful artificial intelligence threaten the future of the whole Glitter Band? And what connection is there with the death of Dreyfus' wife years earlier?

This hard sci-fi novel combines a densely realised future universe with a solid, well-constructed plot.

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