Once that ended it was time for something different, and Century Rain fits that bill even if it does fall rather short as a piece of writing.
It is the twenty-third century and earth has become uninhabitable due to runaway nano-machines. Humanity has split into two groups, those who (quite reasonably in the circumstances) have decided that nano-technology is a bad idea, dubbed the Threshers, and those who think that the accident with earth is good reason to keep working on perfecting the technology, dubbed the Slashers (named after SlashDot. ha ha.)
The Threshers have the solar system and the Slashers have expanded into the galaxy with the benefit of a wormhole network they discovered.
On their travels they discover several system sized solid structures, which appear to contain planets.
By a stroke of luck they find a way into one via the wormhole network and discover that it is a replica of earth, people included, from the 1950s. E2 as it is dubbed is not quite the same as earth - it's history diverged sometime in the 1930s and the second world war never happened.
The Threshers get access to the wormhole and send operatives to E2 to find what is going on. One of them is murdered and Verity Auger is sent to E2 to recover some documents where she runs into an Wendell Floyd, an American private detective who is investigating the murder.
All of which is a very long-winded set-up for a chase thriller and love story, which is what occupies the second half of the book. Will they be able to save the planet? Probably. Will they get together in the end? Probably not.
Where Reynolds' previous books have made the implausable seem perfectly ordinary, this book uses plot devices like it is going out of fashion, has paper-thin characters, doesn't bother explaining why most people are doing what they are doing, and generally tries to be a pot-boiler.
But for all that it does succeed in being a page turner, albeit one with only the most predictable plot-twists.
Which leads me to conclude that while I didn't particularly rate this book, it was more because the author is capable of better rather than the story being a bad one, and if this was a first novel by someone else I would be noting them as a future prospect.
Two stars (out of five) if you have read Alistair Reynolds before
Three stars if you have not