[2] The Prefect is set in the 25th century in the Glitter Band, the realm of thousands of orbital habitats surrounding the planet Yellowstone in the Epsilon Eridani system, and the height of human civilization at the time.

Events take place prior to the advent of the Melding Plague that had already ruined the Glitter Band and caused a massive decline in Yellowstone civilization at the time of the other Revelation Space novels.

Tom Dreyfus is the titular prefect, a member of a special investigations police force called Panoply that is responsible for protecting the Glitter Band.

The novel offers a thoroughly in-depth study of future technology, including augmented reality within the Revelation Space universe, owing its unique setting in the time-line.

The prefect hierarchy is the following: Panoply does not have the right to carry armed weaponry as standard, with the exception of whip-hounds, electronic whips that are used primarily in defence.

His superiors send one of his deputies, Thalia Ng, to distribute software upgrades around the Glitter Band to prevent anyone from attempting a similar violation.

Before they can conclude their investigation, however, the Ultranauts take justice into their own hands and destroy the ship, but not before Dreyfus is able to converse with the captain, who convinces him that his crew were not responsible.

Dreyfus speaks with one of them about the Clockmaker, an alien machine which formerly lived in a Glitter Band research centre, creating, as its name suggests, clocks, before it began a violent killing spree and was destroyed with nuclear weapons nine years prior to the novel.

He and Sparver then analyse communication records from the Ruskin-Sartorious habitat, and discover links with an orbiting asteroid owned by the Nerval-Lermontov family (a member of which was called Aurora).

She meets with Dreyfus and tells him that she and the other Conjoiners had been enslaved by Aurora (now an extremely powerful software entity) to use the Exordium to predict the future.

Outside, the servitors begin to construct "weevil" war machines using plans stolen by Gaffney, a Senior Prefect secretly in alliance with Aurora.

They return to Panoply to find that the weevil attack has collapsed; the Clockmaker has uploaded itself into the Glitter Band's data network and is fighting a digital war with Aurora.

On 25 July 2017 Alastair Reynolds announced on his blog that his next book Elysium Fire would be a direct sequel to The Prefect which itself would be given the new title Aurora Rising, the better to fit with the Panoply stories being a series in their own right within the Revelation Space universe.