Factions in Revelation Space
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These are the human factions found in the Revelation Space universe, the setting for a series of stories and novels by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds.
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[edit] Conjoiners
Conjoiners are also known as the Conjoined by themselves, and the pejorative term spiders by outsiders.
Early experiments by the Conjoiner matriarch Galiana and her group on Mars in the early 22nd century with the uses of technology in augmenting consciousness led to some very interesting results, which prompted her to begin experimenting with allowing her subject's implants to communicate — triggering the event known as the Transenlightenment, and the beginnings of the Mother Nest and of the Conjoiners.
Conjoiners use technology to create a localised group mind. Individual identities are retained, but the group generally functions as a single unit working harmoniously toward its goals. Conjoiner implants are typically neural, and the basic implant is a net of nanomachines that mimic their host's brain structure and thus augment the host's neural capabilities. Artificial enhancements such as vision overlays are not uncommon, and Conjoiners can communicate neurally through fields generated by their implants, which may or may not be amplified by background systems depending on the situation. Most Conjoiners use only neural communication with other Conjoiners and do not physically speak. Their implants also offer them a host of other abilities, such as the ability to hack into and operate a considerable amount of advanced machinery; they have little trouble overriding most software security protocols save their own, and can reprogram weapons to attack their users. They also typically modify their own bodies (often using muscle fibres based on those of chimpanzees) to make themselves physically stronger. Also, at least by the 26th century, the Conjoiners had decided to introduce the cranial-crest to all of the newly recruited. As well as being pleasing aestheticly speaking, it allowed fast dissipation of the huge amounts of thermal energy their super-charged brains produced.
Conjoiners are typically used to being part of a group mind, and most experience disquiet or worse if cut off from other Conjoiners. The few who are capable of operating by themselves are viewed with ambivalence by the rest of Conjoiner society. Notable individuals with this capability include Clavain, Khouri, Skade, and Remontoire. For some, particularly Clavain, it is suspected that this ability has to do with the outdated technology of his implants, which still persist from the very early days of the Conjoiners. In addition to this, Clavain, Skade and Khourie were all born outside the Conjoiners and joined them later, which may also explain why they can leave the collective at will. (It should be noted that virtually no Conjoiners in the novels are actually affected by leaving the collective mind and rejoining it later).
Conjoiners are famous throughout humanity as the only faction capable of building the starship drives that allow interstellar travel. The drives can provide acceleration without requiring any reactant mass. They typically provide constant acceleration needed to drive a starship up to a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, typically at one gee to provide artificial gravity, though they were pushed to several gees in Redemption Ark. This is despite the starships in question being tremendous vessels called "lighthuggers" that are several kilometres long and have carrying capacity for tens of thousands. The drives are tamperproof (to the extent that unauthorised attempts to open them will cause the entire engine complex to explode with sufficient force to destroy the ship carrying it) and thus no other faction has ever been able to copy the designs. The drives were initially introduced from the perspective of non-conjoiner characters, who do not understand how they might work. Later, an answer was provided in Redemption Ark, the first novel to focus on the perspective of Conjoiner characters, where it was revealed that each of the drives has one end of a stable wormhole fixed to the machinery of the interior, the other end fixed in the quark-gluon soup of the first few minutes of the Universe, so that a stream of quark-gluon soup provides both the energy and the reactant mass to drive the engine. It should be noted, however, that the Conjoiners did not actually invent the drive themselves, but received the instructions for it via the Exordium. In the short story Weather, it is revealed that the drives are stabilised by the use of a heavily augmented Conjoiner brain, which is possibly one of the reasons why other factions in the Revelation Space Universe have had no success at creating similar drives.
Although Conjoiners seem monolithic and even like a hive mind to outsiders, some unusual circumstances can still lead to deep division and struggle among them - which as a prerequisite requires them to mask their thoughts from each other without letting on that they are doing so, a difficult feat. Clavain later tells other characters that each Conjoiner is in fact different and has a different mind as all humans do; normal humans simply cannot see it.
The Conjoiners were first introduced in the short story "The Great Wall of Mars", which was first published in Spectrum SF #1, in February 2000, but republished in the collection of short Novellas, Galactic North (2006). At this point, the Conjoiners lived on Mars and the Transenlightenment was relatively recent. The story includes Nevil Clavain, initially an outsider, meeting Galiana and Remontoire, and then joining the Conjoiners. The Conjoiners are then a mere shadowy background group in the novels Revelation Space (2000) and Chasm City (2001), but are the centre of the short story "Glacial", first published in Spectrum SF #5 in March 2001, again republished in Galactic North (2006), which takes place at humanity's first interstellar colony. The Conjoiners are the central focus of the next novel, Redemption Ark (2002), and feature prominently in the following novel, Absolution Gap (2003).
In the afterword of "Galactic North", Alastair Reynolds comments that the Conjoiners are not an entirely new concept, and may owe some of their origin to the Human Hive-mind culture from Michael Swanwick's "Vacuum Flowers".
[edit] Demarchists
The Demarchists are a faction of humanity who have a political system of democratic anarchy, or Demarchy. According to Reynolds' short story A Spy in Europa, the Demarchy functions by means of a neural implant that constantly seeks the user's opinion on aspects of Demarchist life. This constant prompting eventually fades away into the user's neural background, much like the ticking of a clock might fade away into background noise for most people. It is not definitely addressed in the narrative, whether or not the Yellowstone Demarchy, which is the main Demarchy in human space by the time of the events in Revelation Space, uses such a technique (although it is revealed in The Prefect that they do). Other known Demarchies include the Haven and Europan Demarchies (the latter appears to have risen and fallen multiple times) as well as Fand, Grand Teton and many other colonies in other star systems.
Until the time of the Melding Plague, there were several powerful families within the Demarchy, one of the most influential being House Sylveste which controlled SISS or Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies, as well as SIAM or Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation (before it was destroyed by Panolpy during The Clockmaker incident). It later organized the archaeological expedition to Resurgam. They were immensely wealthy, being the closest thing to royalty in the Yellowstone system. Notable characters from House Sylveste include Dan Sylveste, who led the Resurgam expedition; Calvin Sylveste, who is known for the Eighty.
The Demarchists (particularly the Yellowstone Demarchy) also used to have expertise in nanotechnology, life-extension, and biological alterations, among other things. They also utilised a sophisticated information network known as abstraction. Abstraction was used to simulate environments and co-ordinate servitors and other robots. The height of Demarchist society, the Belle Époque, was only brought low by the Melding Plague, which pushed Chasm City, the main city of the Yellowstone Demarchy, into a Dark Age lasting forty years.
Later, after the Conjoiners stepped in to help revive Chasm City, the Demarchists, unhappy with their new role as second fiddle, declared war on the Conjoiners, a war which first went well as the Conjoiners, thanks to their hive-mind nature, became predictable on the battlefield. The return of the war-hero Clavain ended that, and by the time of the events in the book Redemption Ark only the most partisan of Demarchists would even deny an eventual Conjoiner victory.
Demarchist weaponry, among other things, consists of antimatter munitions (or "pinhead" bombs, called such as the tiny amount of antimatter necessary for such weapons can be stored in minute vessels), typically antilithium, and massive rail guns that accelerate foam-phase metallic hydrogen to a massive speed using a series of timed detonations along a barrel. They also utilise various ionisation-particle weapons and compact "fold-out" beam weapons
The Yellowstone Demarchy is destroyed by the time of Absolution Gap by the Inhibitors.
In the afterword of "Galactic North", "Alastair Reynolds" comments that the Demarchists are not his own invention. He continues on to credit the Joan D. Vinge book "The Outcasts of Heaven Belt" as the inspiration for the Demarchist Society.
The term Demarchist is a real political term, derived from "democratic anarchy".
[edit] Coalition For Neural Purity
A faction that existed around the year 2190 after Galiana created the Conjoiners. The Coalition fought the Conjoiners in a war across the solar system, in which Clavain and John Brannigan fought for the Coalition (although both defected eventually). The Demarchists remained neutral in the conflict, but were secretly allied with the Conjoiners. Weaponry used involved robotic worms that could self repair and eat opponents, bioweapons and advanced suits that appeared to use nanotechnology. The Coalition was eventually victorious in the war and forced the Conjoiners to remain on Mars, trapped by a satellite defence network. The Conjoiners eventually escaped Mars by hollowing out one of Mars' moons and creating a lighthugger in its core, which left the solar system. The fate of the Coalition after this is unknown, but it is alluded to in Redemption Ark that the Coalition was no longer active by the time the main events in the series take place.
[edit] Inundationists
A faction which arises on Resurgam during Dan Sylveste's expedition there; beyond opposition to Sylveste's control of the colony, the Inundationists favour taking steps to terraform the planet — potentially destroying the archaeological evidence that the expedition was originally intended to uncover.
[edit] Ultras
Ultranauts are a faction of transhuman spacefarers. The majority of Ultras who appear in the books have opted for extensive and obvious mechanical modifications, replacing their original limbs and organs, but while this is their most obvious and apparently widespread trend, there are counter-arguments. Ilia Volyova, one of the central Ultra characters of the books, has no obvious modifications and is still described as an Ultra, while in Chasm City other characters such as Zebra, who have opted for extreme body modification, are not described as such, indicating that the term may refer either to something biological that is shared by all Ultras, or may possibly be an honorific for those who have served as crew aboard a Lighthugger. All the Ultras encountered in the books have lived long lives, partly due to long periods of cryopreservation or "Reefersleep" during interstellar transit, partly due to the time-dilating effects of near-lightspeed travel, and partly due to their willingness to replace failing organs and limbs with mechanical alternatives, but possibly also due to genetic modifications intended to fit them for space travel.
In Revelation Space, a quirk of Ultra society is described which is not referred to again in subsequent novels set within the same universe; for each session in Reefersleep, they grow and maintain a dreadlock as a badge of their status, although they are also described as using these status symbols as stakes in gambling games, and once again, Ilya Volyova, although an Ultra, does not sport these dreadlocks. Aesthetics do appear to be of greater concern to most Ultras than more pragmatic concerns such as functionality and reliability; the most extensively modified Ultras described in the books have, apparently intentionally, turned themselves into living sculptures.
Unlike other factions in the Revelation Space Universe, such as the Conjoiners and Demarchists, there appears to be no unifying political structure or philosophical school of thought behind Ultra society. Although extremely isolated from baseline humanity (and everyone else not aboard ship) during their long voyages, they do not appear to form particularly close associations even within crews; For the crews of the Nostalgia For Infinity (Revelation Space) and of the Gnostic Ascension (Absolution Gap), power struggles and mistrust are presented as the normal state of affairs. (Although it should be noted that neither crew is exactly normal; shipmaster Inigo Standish in Galactic North comments that Ultras like these crews are a minority).
[edit] Pigs
Pigs within the Revelation Space universe have been genetically modified at various stages throughout Human history. Although modifications were originally related to the growth of human-compatible organs, many races of Pig have heavily altered physiological and neurological states compared to their base ancestors- most notably the ability to think in human terms, and to speak human languages. The origin of such modifications is lost to history, and a puzzle in the universe, since there appears to be no gain to be had to humans for what must have been quite comprehensive and complicated work.
Most Pigs, however, are mute, lacking the ability to form words in either thought or speech. Some Pigs are more intelligent and can interact on a human level, but even they are not as intelligent as humans; Scorpio comments that he has little understanding of complex human interrelationships and when played music, only hears a series of sounds. All but the lowliest have enough intelligence to make them useful as servants, however. Such treatment, and their low standing in human society, leads many into crime. At the time of Chasm City, Pigs are only mentioned as either servants, or a criminal underclass. No Pig has reached a high position of authority among Humans except among the survivors of the planet Resurgam's destruction, where a large number of the rescue party were Pigs.
In Reynolds' The Prefect, the issue of racism between baseline humans and pigs is touched upon in greater and more personal depth than in any of Reynolds' previous novels in the Revelation Space Universe. Deputy Field Prefect Sparver Bancal is an augmented pig who, contrary to the apparent silence and low intelligence level possessed by pigs in previous novels is able to communicate and interact with humans and easily understands complex emotions and issues, such as his own discrimination and the impact of his having been promoted to the rank of Deputy (no pig ever having been ranked so highly before). At numerous junctions Bancal is called upon to either ignore or retaliate to actions of direct racism, but it is clear that the humans' attitude towards pigs is gradually changing in favour of forgiveness, compassion and acceptance.
[edit] Gillies
Gillies are a faction of humans that have been bioengineered to live underwater. Due to the different pressure properties of liquids and gases, this enables them to crew short-range, high-g intra system ships. Most gillies are just normal people or labourers that work in submarine conditions, with barely more than gills on their chests distinguishing them from baseline humanity. Some gillies are mentioned as being so adapted to a submarine environment they cannot breathe or function in air anymore and have to be transported in huge robotic tanks. Their origins were revealed in the story "A Spy in Europa", featured in Galactic North.
[edit] Skyjacks
A human/humanoid faction similar to Ultras in that they spend most of their time in ships. Other than the fact that there is a Skyjack presence somewhere in the vicinity of Yellowstone (or its system), little else is known. The name appears to be derived from 'steeplejack,' craftsmen who use scaffolding and pulleys to scale and repair buildings. Skyjacks seem to be comet and asteroid miners who presumably keep an eye out for salvage and other items of interest. Mention is made in Redemption Ark of Skyjacks tethering themselves to comets and drilling test bores. Reynolds makes only a few references to Skyjacks in his RS novels.
