Machine Vendetta is the third book in the Prefect Dreyfus Emergency series featuring a officer of the law for a system of floating city states that orbit the planet Yellowstone, and the enemy that wants to destroy everything including Tom Dreyfus. A prefect who happens to be a hyperpig (an uplifted pig functioning alongside humans) has apparently betrayed his office and staged a suicide attack on one habitat.

This novel's ideas are mind-stretching, including a limbo where copies of the dead can be kept and interrogated, and a chillingly mischievous AI that tempts and mocks Dreyfus.A sequel to Elysium Fire, it is the eighth novel set in the Revelation Space universe, and the third in the A Prefect Dreyfus Emergency spinoff series. For those who have followed this series it is not a spoiler to say that rogue AI machines are the bete noire of the series.

One can have ships move at hyperspace or travel wormholes, treating space like World War II fighters, or have lumbering near light transports taking years to get to their location. How Alastair Reynolds creates not only a galaxy but a complex and multi prong plot that satisfies completely is beyond me!

Reynolds again doesn't disappoint and proves while he is a master of the sci Fi genre and an author I always look forward to. These characters seem real and lived in, with lives outside their jobs, different ways of approaching problems, and each other. Clarke Award; Revelation Space, Absolution Gap, Diamond Dogs, and Century Rain were shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award, and Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award.