Galactic North

Another uneven collection of short stories; this one in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space universe.
The first couple, Great Wall of Mars and Glacial, feature characters from his later opus: Clavain, Galiana, and Felka. They provide some backstory mentioned in the later books.
Most of the rest of the tales, while set in the RS universe, are entirely peripheral to the later books. A Spy in Europa, Dilation Sleep, Grafenwalder's Beastiary, and Nightingale I found to be uncomfortably dark. Nightingale is longer, better developed, and more engrossing, but with a quite morbid twist at the end. Weather falls into the dark category too, but has the interesting feature of revealing a secret of the Conjoiner drives.
The story Galactic North itself starts not quite 200 years in the future, but finishes, leaving us hanging, somewhere near the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It recalls other of Reynolds's time numbing car chases across spacetime, but perhaps exceeds them all in scale.
The Afterword is refreshing. Reynolds is aware of and blunt about the flaws in his stories. He provides some interesting personal history of their writing and his influences.
Not a book for everybody. Had I not read most of the other Revelation Space books, thing probably would not have fit together as well and I might have rated it more like 2 stars.