Revelation Space Timeline (Updated 1/2022)

I just finished my journey through all the published Revelation Space stories in (in-universe) chronological order (review of the series in my next post).  I am big on that ordering; my Narnia set starts with The Magician's Nephew and, when Winds of Winter gets announced, I plan to do a reread using the interleaved chapters from A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons.

However, I found that the resources to help someone read Revelation Space in order are in somewhat short supply and I found the ones present to be lacking in various areas.  Some of what I used you can find at the bottom.

Official Alastair Reynolds timeline - Doesn't have events from every story on it, however I consider all dates on it gospel for the purpose of making my own timeline
Neal Ulen's blog - Almost perfect but I dispute a few of his years and the ordering
Wikipedia's timeline - Missing several stories and some of the years definitely don't make sense given the events in the story.  Primarily used to encourage me to make this.

One last thing, if you are not a completionist and want to know if any of these will help your understanding of the Inhibitor Trilogy (the main three books), I would say the top 5 things to read, in order of importance:

1. "Great Wall of Mars"
2. "Galactic North"
3. Chasm City
4. "Glacial"
5. "Turquoise Days"

To be clear, I don't believe these to necessarily be the best or most interesting of the stories below, just the ones that add the most depth to the main trilogy. Obviously, the main trilogy can be read without any support but I highly recommend at least reading "Great Wall of Mars" at some point before Redemption Ark because it helps add some development and backstory to the main characters of that book.  (Also, don't read "Galactic North" before the main series, it spoils a lot of what happens).

Some notes on the timeline:

• If multiple stories cover the same stretch of time, I sort them by their end date
• I kept all the books together with the exception of Chasm City because I think it is better to read the prologue before the stories that take place concurrently with it (at the same time, I think reading the short stories wholly after Chasm City robs them of a little emotional impact)
• If my reason for choosing a year contains spoilers for other stories, I'll put it at the bottom so that you can use this as a resource without seeing spoilers.
• If a story has an epilogue that takes place long after the story, I won't consider that as part of when the story takes place unless it spoils other events
• The Prefect has been republished in some places as Aurora Rising.
• "Quoted text" denotes short stories and novellas, italics denotes full novels, blue denotes stories with characters from Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies (a subseries), and green denotes stories with characters from the Inhibitor Trilogy (the main series)

Story	Year	Book that contains story	Explanation for year
"Great Wall of Mars"	2205	Galactic North or Beyond the Aquila Rift	From AR timeline
"Glacial"	2217	Galactic North	From AR timeline
"Night Passage"	2338	Infinite Stars or Belladonna Nights	From AR timeline
"A Spy in Europa"	2339	Galactic North	Clearly shortly before event in AR Timeline
"Weather"	2358	Galactic North or Beyond the Aquila Rift	See note [0] at bottom
The Prefect/Aurora Rising	2427	The Prefect	Explicitly says year in story
"Open and Shut"	2428	Gollancz or Belladonna Nights	Clearly shortly after The Prefect
Elysium Fire	2429	Elysium Fire	Stated it takes place two years after events in The Prefect
Chasm City Prologue	2510	Chasm City	From AR timeline (technically takes place in 2517 but almost exclusively describes events in 2510)
"Monkey Suit"	2511	Deep Navigation	Clearly shortly after event in AR Timeline
"Plague Music"	2512	Belladonna Nights	Clearly shortly after event in AR Timeline
"Dilation Sleep"	2513	Galactic North	Clearly shortly after event in AR Timeline
Chasm City	2502-2524	Chasm City	Explicitly says year in story
"Diamond Dogs"	2500-2527	Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days or Beyond the Aquila Rift	See note [1] at bottom
"Grafenwalder's Bestiary"	2530	Galactic North	Said to be "two centuries" after the events in "A Spy in Europa" and shortly after the events of "Diamond Dogs"
"Turquoise Days"	2539-2541	Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days	From AR timeline
"Nightingale"	2545	Galactic North	See note [2] at bottom
Revelation Space	2524-2567	Revelation Space	From AR timeline
"The Last Log of the Lachrimosa"	2530	Subterranean Press or Beyond the Aquila Rift	See note [3] at bottom
Redemption Ark	2605-51	Redemption Ark	From AR timeline
Absolution Gap	2615-2727 [4]	Absolution Gap	Explicitly says year in story
Inhibitor Phase	2791-2858	Inhibitor Phase	Explicitly says year in story
"Galactic North"	2303-40000	Galactic North	Explicitly says year in story

(Minor) Spoilers:
[0]: Not many hints on when this takes place but after 2350 based on the AR timeline.  The other websites use 2358 so I will go with that
[1]: The story explicitly starts "a century and a half" after The Eighty but the melding plague hasn't hit yet which doesn't work with the AR timeline.  2500 seems to be about as late as I can put it while still leaving the ending early enough.  The ending year is again, about as late as I can put it.  I would argue that textual evidence implies that it is after the end of Chasm City and hints in "Turquoise Days" imply that that story takes place decades later.
[2]: Clearly after the parts of Chasm City that take place on Sky's Edge. The story says there has been 250 years of war starting immediately after their arrival on Sky's Edge which the official timeline says happened in the 23rd century.  Given people's memories and skills, I think this has to be at most 10 years after the end of the war. Since Khouri arrives on Yellowstone in 2524, and the war was still going when she left, this means the range of possible years of the story is 2510 to 2559 (260 + 2299)
[3]: I know that this one is out of place but I think that it is better read after Revelation Space when you know what the Inhibitors are and their history.  The year is almost entirely conjecture, some point after 2510 and before 2600 but closer to 2510

[4] The prologue and epilogue of Absolution Gap take place in ~2950 and contain at least one character who is also present in Inhibitor Phase, spoiling their survival. However, Reynolds clearly made a choice to bookend Absolution Gap with this flashforward so I am hesitant to advise you to skip both until you finish Inhibitor Phase. Inhibitor Phase should definitely be read after the main body of Absolution Gap.

In addition, I came up with a dependency tree for how all the stories interact.  I'll post it down here since it has minor spoilers.

Angelmaker

After The Gone Away World took the spot for my favorite book read in 2014, I knew it was only a matter of time before I read the rest of the books by Nick Harkaway.  Angelmaker is in no way related to the The Gone Away World but it is absolutely its spiritual successor.

Angelmaker is to thriller detective stories what The Gone Away World was to post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories.  It takes a lot of the absurdist elements of his previous work, reins them in just a tiny, tiny bit, and casts them into a noir setting.

Angelmaker takes a little bit to get going and its absurdism dulls the thriller elements a tad (a tradeoff well worth it in my opinion) but it absolutely has some great payoffs.  Some fun moments include James Bond as an eighty year old woman, a heroic elderly pug, a clockmaker as the protagonist, and of course, a layered and thoroughly absurd conclusion.

When I finished it, I thought that it had perhaps a higher average quality throughout the book than The Gone Away World but lower highs but I also like sci-fi more than thrillers so someone with the reverse preferences might disagree.

Overall, I would give this book an 88%.