 Three books by Alistair Reynolds. I want to cover in this review starting with Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days. These are two novellas. They are set in Reynolds Revelation Space universe. Diamond Dogs is about a shady character who recruits a group of other shady characters, kind of a dirty dozen, to explore a mysterious tower on a lifeless world. It was obviously built by aliens. No one knows who, why, how, or when. The terrain around the tower is littered with the bodies of other spacefarers who tried to explore it. It is a good alien exploration mystery and Reynolds leaves it as an open mystery and he also introduces some fascinating characters, some of which we'll see again. The second story, Turquoise Days, is actually the superior of the two stories. There's some excellent world-building that I was very impressed with. In many of Reynolds' stories and novels he refers to beings called the pattern jugglers, which he never explains and people who visit the world of the jugglers sometimes return dramatically changed with computer-like mathematical abilities. This story explains the jugglers. It's very creative and a very unique story. However, Reynolds does one thing in Turquoise Days that really rubbed me the wrong way. There's a single sentence, just one sentence, that makes reference to Diamond Dogs, the previous story, and just that one throwaway sentence greatly diminishes the mystery of Diamond Dogs, which was the real strength of the story. I wish he hadn't done that, but I guess sometimes even the best authors can't restrain themselves. Anyway, on to the next one. Galactic North, a collection of short stories, also in Revelation Space. A number of these stories give some really good history and backstory to Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. There's one story in particular that sees the return of one of the aforementioned interesting characters from Diamond Dogs. One of Reynolds' strengths is he comes up with really great villains, and he is at his best in the medium of the short story. I always recommend Reynolds' collections of short stories. Now, on to the prefect. This is a very long book. 600 pages. I've reviewed short story collections by Reynolds before, and I reviewed one other novel by Reynolds, and I said in that review that when I find an author who's really good at short stories, I'm always reluctant to pick up their novels because I'm afraid that their style won't carry over to the novel format. That was true with the other novel that I reviewed, and it's more true with this one. It started off really strong, and again, Reynolds is really good at coming up with great villains. Really, really interesting, unique and memorable villains. But with each chapter, he was introducing more new characters and more new back history and more and more and more, and there was so much. I was starting to think, is he gonna be able to give all of these characters and histories and new conditions? The attention that they deserve and the answer is no. He would introduce new characters and new subplots just to forget them or even to eliminate them, and then by the middle of the book, I was starting to feel like this is long. This is getting really long. And then by the end of the book, I had to basically make myself finish it. The lead character in here, the protagonist is named Dreyfus. So much of this book consists of Dreyfus talking. Dreyfus just talking and talking and talking, and mostly what he's doing is explaining things to other characters. Even while their lives are in danger, when there are space battles going on, when they should be running for their lives or taking action, everything stops while Dreyfus explains things to somebody, and he's usually explaining the entire history of the book that's come before, which we already know. Right up until the last pages of the book, I could skip entire pages because I could see that Dreyfus was just talking. It was just Dreyfus talking and talking and talking. Unfortunately, I can't recommend this. Reynolds, he's better as a short story writer. Please remember to press that like button. It helps my videos get seen, and then subscribe so you can come back next time. I do science fiction book, TV, and movie reviews all the time, and please consider becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below.