Factions in Revelation Space
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These are human factions found in the Revelation Space series of stories and novels.
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[edit] Conjoiners
Conjoiners are a faction of Humanity featured in the science fiction Revelation Space series by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds. They are also known as the Conjoined by themselves, and the pejorative term spiders by outsiders.
Early experiments by 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.
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, Skade, and Remontoire. For some, particularly Clavain, it is suspected that this ability has to do with the outdated technology of his brain implants, which still persist from the very early days of the Conjoiners.
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 kilometers long and have carrying capacity for tens of thousands. The drives are tamperproof 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.
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.
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. 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 center of the short story "Glacial", first published in Spectrum SF #5 in March 2001, 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). After a gap of a few years in the Revelation Space universe, Reynolds is due to publish a new collection this fall called Galactic North that is to include three new novella-length stories set in the RS universe, which will deal, among other things, with "a dark secret of the Conjoiners".
[edit] Demarchists
The Demarchists are a faction of humanity in the science fiction Revelation Space series written by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds.
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 unknown whether the Yellowstone Demarchy, which is the main Demarchy in human space by the time of the events in Revelation Space, uses such a technique.
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 the SISS or Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies, and which also later organized the Resurgam expedition. They were also immensely wealthy. Notable characters from House Sylveste include Dan Sylveste, who led the Resurgam expedition; Calvin Sylveste, who is known for the Eighty, and Lorean Sylveste.
The Demarchy also used to have expertise in nanotechnology, life-extension, and biological alterations, among other things. The height of Demarchist society, the Belle Epoqué, was only brought low by the Melding Plague, which pushed the 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 (or "pinhead") munitions, 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.
The Demarchy is presumably destroyed by the time of Absolution Gap.
[edit] Indundationists
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 fictional group of transhuman spacefarers within the Revelation Space universe of Alastair Reynolds. 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. Ilya 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 scupltures.
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.
[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. 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.
