Bone Silence

By: Alastair Reynolds

Narrated by: Clare Corbett

Length: 19 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

Return to the Revenger universe, for another thrilling tale set among the stars....

Quoins are accepted currency throughout the thousands of worlds of the Congregation. Ancient, and of unknown origin and purpose, people have traded with them, fought for them, and stolen quoin hordes from booby-trapped caches at risk to life and limb throughout the Thirteen Occupations. Only now it's becoming clear they have another purpose...as do the bankers who've been collecting them.

The Occupations themselves are another puzzle. The rise and fall of civilisation may have been unevenly spaced across history, but there is also a pattern. Could something be sparking the Occupations - or ending them? And if so, what could it be, lurking far beyond the outermost worlds of the Congregation?

The Ness sisters are being hunted for crimes they didn't commit by a fleet whose crimes are worse than their own. If they're to survive, and stay one step ahead of their pursuers - if they're to answer the questions which have plagued them - it's going to require every dirty, piratical trick in the book....

©2019 Alastair Reynolds (P)2019 Orion Publishing Group

Critic reviews

"A swashbuckling thriller - Pirates of the Caribbean meets Firefly - that nevertheless combines the author's trademark hard SF with effective, coming-of-age characterisation." (Guardian)

"A blindingly clever imagining of our solar system in the far flung future." (Sun)

"A rollicking adventure yarn with action, abduction, fights, properly scary hazards, very grisly torture and even ghosts of a sort." (Daily Telegraph)

Almost

I love Alistair Reynolds books generally; Revelation Space particularly. This felt different somehow. The setting and premise was primed for something amazing, however never quite hit it. It was either the fact that a pirate / naval theme never quite felt plausible in the far, far future or that the characters felt shallow. The latter I think. Those girls acted like no real person would in many of the situations they found themselves in and were saved by deus ex machina more times than I care to count.

A good work by a capable writer. Maybe undone by an intrinsically flawed idea.

Edit: During my post-review shower I had time to reflect on the following... I did not regret reading this book in any way and I by no means wish to dissuade potential readers. It was a good story with some very interesting and original ideas. I'm happy I experienced it. Just, don't go in expecting exactly the same level of focus on character authenticity as RS. If you can get past that, it's quite enjoyable!

Great ending to this trilogy

I’m a big fan of Alastair Reynolds and his work - as the content of my audible plainly shows - and this was a thoroughly enjoyable romp sometime a long way into a possible future. My only disappointment was realising that there would be no fourth book.

gone woke

what was all this slave bs toward the end. maybe I wasn't listening properly as my mind drifted due to the tired story,

Alastair Reynolds expand our imaginations again!

I'm love this new adventure in the series . This is a new imagining for the adventures of the sisters Ness. Books 1&2 expand their universe in leaps and bounds, this one explodes it!

slow and turgid

The protagonists are consistently under prepared except for a few times it is essential for the story. It rather rapidly becomes annoying. it's well wriiten just not at all a fast moving story. Great reader though

Really disappointing.

This book started well however everything started to get a bit flat really quickly, a very lazy ending.

Well if you’ve got this far..

..this book will probably not disappoint you. More adventuring with the Ness sisters. The only downside is the ending felt rushed.

Narration was good.

96% great - 4% awful

I love Alastair Reynolds work and I really enjoyed the compete series up until the last chapter. Till now I thought Game of Thrones was the worse ending but this just runs away with the prize.

How they saw one thing and just extrapolated such an odd conclusion when in my mind other conclusions to the same minimal evidence were much more obvious. Then take that an extrapolate ad nauseam in what made me just wonder if this was just some woke self flagellation, was not just a terrible ending but really spoilt what had been 36+ hours of fun listening. The ridiculous amount of self hatred for something based of a weird speculation about a thing your very very very distant relatives did millions of years before was so crap, out of character and out of place I can only think someone else wrote that end. That was not the only problem with the last chapter, just the worse by a mile.

Such a shame after how enjoyable the rest had been, even though that did suffer from characters that changed character into petulant teenage girl mode a few times that also was annoying.

It was another 5* like every other Alastair Reynolds book I've read till the end and I still can't believe it was so bad that I really can't justify any more than a 1*

More technical or production issues

Claire Corbett has a nice voice and I think she carries this book off well.

Unfortunately sometimes the sound became a little muffled. After an hour I still could not make out what the characters names were. I played this in my car on max volume and still the sound was muffled. Returned for refund

Swashbuckling in Space me hearties!

The narration for this series is so good I'd give it seven stars. Clare Corbett creates the atmosphere of swashbuckling on the high seas of interstellar space magically with her wonderful range of voices and characterisation. Each person comes to life so vividly. Masterful!
As usual Alastair Reynolds creates a wonderful arena for the story to unfold in. It is like the dark ages after the Romans left. People grope around interstellar space using hardly understood aspects of what technology is left behind and living on strange treasures created by the godlike civilisations of the distant past.
It would make a great series of films. Pure escapism for the strange times we now live in! Go there!

good fun, ending a little rushed

this is a nice conclusion to the revenger trilogy, although the ending felt like it was trying to cram in another book's worth of exposition into the last couple of chapters.

definitely worth it if you've enjoyed the other two.