It seems old sea-dogs can learn new tricks after all. We’ll likely never get Alastair Reynolds out of deep space, but Revenger sees him sailing a little closer to the narrative wind, swapping the over-engineered complexity that characterises his inimitable form of space opera for a slimmer, more nimble vessel. And yes, I’m getting the nautical puns out of the way up front, because Revenger is acknowledged to be an sfnal slant on classic maritime adventure fiction—think Forester’s Hornblower series, Bernard Cornwell’s naval novels, that sort of stuff.

Of course, “they’re like regular ships, but in space!” isn’t an original concept; space opera is marbled with it, Reynolds’s earlier novels very much included. The difference is in the narration: sure, we’ve got a vast, old storyverse littered with the remains of preceding civilisations (the deep past as palimpsest, per Vance and Wolfe), and we’ve got spaceship crews hoisting sails to the solar wind, buckling the swash etc. But Revenger isn’t military fiction, and its protagonist is no stubble-jawed hero.

Raised on a two-town boondock world, sisters Adrana and Fura Ness run away to sea—sorry, to space—ostensibly to earn their fading father out of his debts. They both have the ability to boneread—to commune with the alien skulls used by spaceships to swap rumours and keep in touch over the vastness of deep space—and are settling well into their first commission. Their captain is a treasure-hunter, trawling through “baubles”—ancient artificial worlds, boobytrapped and sealed up behind force-fields—for whatever ancient or alien bric-a-brac they might flog at a profit. But their haul of loot attracts a different sort of scavenger, and the dread pirate Bosa Sennen swoops in, killing off most of the crew, and stealing Adrana away to be her new bonereader. Saved by the sacrifice of her crewmates, Fura sets her sights on revenge, and plots to take down Bosa and her legendary ship The Nightjammer once and for all… and if you think she’ll accomplish that by playing nice and taking the moral high road, well, think again.

Fura is an enjoyably hard-nosed character, if rather a thin one: Revenger is very much an adventure story, and as such the characterisation stands in subservience to plot. The characters have exactly as much in the way of motivation or backstory as is required to keep things moving, but little more. But I’m oddly pleased by Reynolds’s choice to make her not just flawed but unrepentant, and giving her a vengeance storyline without any saccharine redemption at the close. That might go some way to explaining why Revenger isn’t billed as a YA title, a choice that both surprised and pleased me: surprised, because Fura’s bildungsroman, gritty as it is, ticks most of the boxes on the YA manifest; pleased, because it suggests that we may have moved past the use of condescension for marketing purposes. Revenger is not a book for teenagers, but it is a book that teenagers could enjoy—and is likely more accessible to them than Reynolds’s usual super-dense style, which requires a working knowledge of the sf reading protocols to be fully appreciated.

One side-effect of that narrative simplicity is a paucity of eyeball kicks, made all the more surprising given the sublimity of the setting: the temptation to go to town on descriptive stuff must have been hard to resist. Another is that the novel’s tone slips around a little bit, teetering between homage and pastiche… though that could be plausibly put down as reflecting Fura’s bluff willingness to treat her role like a rollercoaster.

But I really didn’t care a whit—Revenger was a fun, fast read that hit all the space-adventure high notes while dodging the worst of the cliches. There’s also the clear possibility (if not an outright promise) of more more adventures for Fura, or at least more stories from the Congregation. Reynolds has set up an adventure-centric universe with lightyears of narrative space yet to be explored… and that’s a journey I’ll gladly take ship for.