It's believed that only the technological expertise of the Sylveste family can help cure the captain. And they're desperate to find Sylveste because their captain has been infected with the Melding Plague, a virus that attacks human cells and machine nanotechnology in equal measure, perverting them into grotesque combinations. The Nostalgia for Infinity is an ancient ship that once carried hundreds of thousands, but now its crew is only a handful of Ultras-highly modified humans adapted to the rigors of long interstellar spaceflight. Because information is often decades old by the time it reaches other human settlements in a universe without faster-than-light travel, the crew does not realize it has been more than 15 years since Sylveste left Yellowstone to pursue archaeological work on Resurgam. Next, the book jumps back to 2540, where most of the crew of the starship Nostalgia for Infinity are frozen for the journey to Yellowstone (in the Epsilon Eridani system) in order to find Sylveste. As a violent dust storm threatens to temporarily shut down the excavation, Sylveste discovers new evidence that the entire Amarantin race achieved a much higher level of technological sophistication than was previously known, before they were wiped out in a single mysterious cataclysm. Dan Sylveste, an xenoarchaeologist, leader of the colony, and wealthy scion of a prominent scientific family, leads a team excavating the remains of the Amarantin, a long-dead, 900,000-year-old civilization that once existed on Resurgam. The book opens in the year 2551 on Resurgam, a planet considered a backwater on the edge of colonized human space.

This plot device is characteristic of many of Reynolds's works. Revelation Space starts off with three seemingly unrelated narrative strands that eventually meet-and merge-as the novel progresses.

Revelation space