House of Suns: Alastair Reynolds (GOLLANCZ S.F.)

Product Information

Sci-fi is commonly castigated (perhaps unfairly) as overly masculine in terms of authors, readers, and the characters within. In this case, simulations, AI, agents, and upbringing optimization could be influenced by one, to avoid spoiler, of the offered options: hacking, secret use, AI gone sentient, agent gone mad, etc. He also guides the reader to understand the immense timescales that these characters deal with (many of them are millions of years old) without being boring or redundant. The amount of mind-bending concepts Reynolds managed to pack into this novel while maintaining a coherent story is impressive: Star dams, ring worlds, causality, time dilation, artificial intelligence, solar system relocation, ancient technology, the nature of memory, longevity, cloning, wormholes, civilizational “turnover”, etc. House of Suns is a novel by Welsh sci-fi author Alastair Reynolds, set in more or less the same universe as the novella Thousandth Night .

On the time scale of the galaxy, it's not all that unlikely that a sapient species could evolve, expand, and then go extinct in the space of a few million years, with huge gaps between such species. After some coercion, he shows them his entire collection of ships, which were hidden inside and disguised as part of the gas giant's ring system. Faster-Than-Light Travel: Humanity never broke the light speed barrier, and all travel has to be done STL, with everything that implies. Partly, he does this by helping the reader connect to the human feelings that his characters feel, which would be similar regardless of how long one had been around or how far the future extended ahead of them. Artificial Gravity: Used by the starships to propel themselves and to protect their occupants from the crushing force of their thrust.Bio- and nanotechnology and its possible uses, misuses, and funny accidents with it are a recurring theme in his work, Melding plague, Greenfly, abilities of machines, etc, and one of the most fascinating aspects of Sci-Fi, be it in worldbuilding, abilities, or the effects on protagonists if they more or less willingly transform. With too much telling and not enough showing, he leaves little for the reader to speculate and infer.

In my spare time I am a very keen runner, and I also enjoying hill-walking, birdwatching, horse-riding, guitar and model-making. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The Lines develop a virus to disable the robots if they pose a threat to human civilization, triggered remotely.Early machine intelligences were fascinated by arts and sciences because “The only genuinely innovative act they had ever achieved was to come into existence”. At the risk of sounding too harsh, "statements of fact" sums up everything I dislike about this book. Also used for inertial dampening, as a ship's shields can be projected internally around its inhabitants, allowing extremely high-g maneuvers that would normally render everybody inside to jelly.

The most interesting aspect is not the ethical one of editing and deleting, but the deeper, psychological effects of memories and personalities merging and melding: shatterlings who share DNA and a childhood, and convene to combine their latest experiences; those who become part of overly-realistic virtual reality; and machine intelligences that can split and then coalesce and confugure their minds with other machines and even post-humans. That said the story is not hard to follow providing you give it time to unfold and settle you in its very far future settings. I’d say this would be a terrific jumping in point if you were interested in checking out Reynolds’ work. The above passage from House of Suns serves to illustrate the author's grandiose scheme for this book. I think I read that Reynolds has thrown out the continuity of Thousandth Night because there are characters who appear in both that were killed off in that one, or something.And so how can I tell you about the journey of two shatterlings, who are in love and who are not really allowed to be because of the rules of their society, without ruining that enjoyment for you? On board Silver Wings of Morning, Hesperus reveals to Campion that while he managed to destroy Cadence before they could leave the Neume star system, Cascade survived and he and Cascade had engaged in a marathon battle, several thousand years. Simply put, it’s because everything else I’ve read (that wasn’t a novella) has been set in his Revelation Space universe, making much of it difficult – or even impossible – to discuss without extensive spoilers, or contextualising that would take up as much space as the review itself. Die Welt ist typisch Reynolds: epische Science Fiction, in Zeit und Raum gigantisch, aber trotzdem stimmig.

The Fog of Ages: The shatterlings have lived through six million years (though, admittedly, only a couple tens of thousands of those conscious) and routinely re-arrange/edit their memory. The novel is set in the same fictional setting as Reynolds' novella "Thousandth Night", which appears in the anthology One Million A. Unfortunately, Campion, in a previous circuit, unwittingly uncovered information pertaining to the extermination. It was indeed – it uses the setting and some characters from the novella Thousandth Night (which I haven’t read).Unable to get within weapons range, Campion pursues Purslane’s ship for sixty thousand light years, during which time he and Purslane, on their separate ships, are suspended in "abeyance", a form of temporal slowdown or stasis. It exists in that sweet spot directly between what you currently understand, and what you are capable of understanding.