Chasm City

Chasm City is a 2001 science fiction novel by the British writer Alastair Reynolds, published by Gollancz and set in the same universe as his earlier novel Revelation Space.

The city of the title stands under a dome on the planet Yellowstone, a settlement whose power came from the skyholt of another world. The Melding Plague has disrupted the machinery it was built from, and the result is a place with a wealthy centre, districts run by families who have gone their own way, and levels where a person's standing depends on what they are prepared to lose. Tanner Mirabel, a security expert, arrives to avenge the death of his former client's wife at the hands of a nobleman named Argent Reivich, and finds the settlement in ruins instead of the city he had heard about.

Reynolds gives much of the book's attention to the physical and social shape of the city itself, and its themes are identity, memory and the possibility of living forever. It won the British Science Fiction Association award in 2002.