While I thought Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space was just ok, I really loved his standalone book Chasm City. I picked it up randomly at a book exchange and

While I thought Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space was just ok, I really loved his standalone book Chasm City. I picked it up randomly at a book exchange and was blown away. The universe is fiercely imaginative and colorful, the dialog is snappy, the characters are flawed and interesting, the science is just hard enough to be vaguely plausible, but on the whole there's enough silliness for the book to not take itself completely seriously. The mysteries are compelling and the plot winds up nicely. I highly recommend it over his other Revelation Space books--it's truly a brilliant, self-contained space opera in every sense of the word. It was the first book of his I read and I haven't since read something so brightly imaginative.