House of Suns

This was really such a trip. A great book and one I would highly recommend to any fan of sci-fi. This is definitely what I'd classify as pretty dense sci-fi though, so if you're not familiar with the genre or not in the mood for it, this probably wouldn't be something you'd pick up.

The premise of this universe was just fascinating. We're here millions of years into the future, where the human scions of time long past have made clones of themselves called shatterling which, while biologically human, could persist for millions and millions of years, their duties to keep watch over the other emerging and falling civilisation around the Milky Way Galaxy. In particular, we are concerned with Campion and Purslane, two clones from the Line created from Abigail Gentian, the house from which cloning technology was invented in the first place. In rushing towards a Line reunion, Campion and Purslane pick up an unexpected guest from the Machine People (essentially robots), introducing himself as Hesperus and apparently with a bad case of amnesia.

This book isn't incredibly long but it felt like it, because there were so many things that happened. It probably also felt long because the chronology in this book is whack. In order to be spacefaring travellers, the shatterlings also have to reckon time on an astronomical scale. Interstellar travel takes light years and this book acknowledges it. They spend millenia traveling around the galaxy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the events of this book spans at least a million years, if not more. I'm an astronomy nut so I was pretty happy nerding about stuff like this, and the imagination of how humans might be able to overcome that hurdle in interstellar travel (in this book, by stasis technology that essentially slows time down for your body alone, so a hundred thousand years may pass in what you subjectively experience as a minute).

So I was intrigued by the premise and technology and universe that this book already set out, but I was also equally fascinated by the plot. We are introduced to Abigail Gentian at the beginning as a little girl, supposedly heiress of a large, rambling mansion, and whose only playmate is a mysterious little boy. We know she is the progenitor of the Gentian Line, to which our protagonists Campion and Purslane belong, but there're all sorts of questions raised about how she came about to create shatterlings in the first place, and how to connect the dots between Abigail and the creation of her Gentian Line.

The chapters in this book constantly shift between Campion and Purslane's perspectives, and I think it was deliberate that the author never explicitly mentioned whose point of view it was, and you had to infer that as the chapter went on. It wasn't confusing or difficult, but it certainly blurred the lines between Campion and Purslane, which I think was the point - they are clones after all. I didn't mind that change in perspectives, but it also drove home the slight unease I felt about Campion and Purslane's romance. It almost felt a bit... incestuous? Nevertheless, despite being clones, they were both distinct enough from each other that I was able to tell them apart most of the time.

Spoilery thoughts: I guess the reason why I wouldn't give this a straight 5 stars was because I thought there were a lot of questions not answered by the end, or a lot of loopholes in the explanations. My hype for this book started fading once we found out from Hesperus about the First Machines. It didn't make sense to me why the Machine People would form such a strong association with this ancient robot civilization that they've never even come into contact with before, simply because they were robots? I just felt like if we ever found out there was some ancient human civilization that got wiped out, I don't know if humans would care that much, honestly. And the Machine People had never been under any direct threat from the organic civilizations thus far, so it felt like they were poking a hornet's nest without any impetus to do so.Also, I'm not sure if I missed it but I don't really know what was the role of Palatial in this whole story? I was expecting there to be some link between the simulation story and the one we saw played out. While we did see certain parallels between Purslane and Abigail as the princess, I was quite confused overall about why we had to go through all the Palatial sequences. I was convinced that the little boy was Valmik, and perhaps he is? But we never really got a confirmation of that. We also don't know which shatterling Abigail became, but I guess that was meant to be a deliberate non-answer. I would guess it's Purslane though.Why didn't we get more explanation about the House of Suns? Who started this House? Who recruits people into this House? What was the point of going through all this effort to make sure all the Lines didn't remember the genocide that they committed? I just struggled to see the point of this secret House and all the stuff they've been doing for 6 million years. I really expected a lot more about them considering this whole book was named after them.Lastly, that ending just felt way too abrupt. I can understand when an author wants to leave a bit of an open ending, but I felt like that was the wrong point to end a story. Hesperus sacrificed himself to save Purslane, we can be fairly sure that the person inside Hesperus is Purslane, and then... what? How are Campion and Purslane going to start a new civilization in Andromeda? It seems like they're essentially stranded there, right?

Nevertheless though, I overall really enjoyed this book and was super glad to have picked it up for my book club, I don't think I would have otherwise heard of it at all. Would definitely check out more from Reynolds.

After my Culture binge I guess I didn't get enough space opera because I went straight to Reynolds. This book was sold to me as one of Reynold's best works, and a great book to decide if you want more. I think I can sign off on parts of that endorsement; this is a great story that definitely evokes Banks in the world building department and surpasses Banks when it comes to plotting and pacing. It is self contained and exquisite, and while I haven't read any of his other works I got the sense that this book really was the perfect taster for Reynolds.

That said I don't know if I am sold on Reynolds, this story was not any longer than a Culture novel but it didn't hit quite the same and felt long. I figured that a story about incestuous clones attending a galactic family reunion would be funnier, or at least bring along a little levity, but this is absolutely meat and potatoes sci-fi.

I did find the concept of shatterlings, 1000 male and female clones of one person made into immortal space faring explorers, to be iconic and wildly imaginative- if a little narcissistic and implausible. This book also gave us a little taste of Reynolds' belief in the hard limit of light speed, and his reasoning and extrapolation managed to make an entire galaxy feel stifling and small.

I still plan to read revelation space but I think I will kick that can down the road a bit.

“No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.”

This had all the makings of a great book for me, but it ended up feeling like the harder I tried putting the pieces together, the worse the book felt. Such a great story idea! Great writing! (Theoretically) interesting characters! But once you start putting any sort of thought into what was going on, the cracks start showing. Ultimately I rated this based on feel—I had a lot of fun reading it in the moment—but the ending turns the story into a big nothingburger of a letdown.

Because of the sheer scale of this book, it's hard to summarize. A regular gathering (every 200,000 years) of the clones of Abigail, a brilliant scientist and founder of the Gentian Line, goes terribly wrong, and the investigation into why this all happened is the core plot of the book. We get to know a few of these clones (called Shatterlings) throughout the course of the investigation as they retreat to a desert planet to lick their wounds and regroup. Campion and Purslane, the two main characters of the book, rescued a member of the Machine People (a technology-based race of beings) on the way to the reunion, who ends up playing a critical role in how everything plays out.

I'm being very brief with this summary because it's kind of hard to pin down. Heavy spoilers in this section.

The author throws lots of misdirection at the audience throughout the book, which I found a bit distracting. It seems like every character, Shatterling or not, gets the "oh, maybe this character did it" treatment at some point, which can be fun if done right, but I sort of found annoying in this book. Dribbles of information about the endgame plot are doled out throughout the investigation, but not a lot of it ends up being fleshed out to any satisfying degree in the end. The characters introduced never seem to come together for me either, as motives and actions seemed inconsistent from scene to scene, and several characters introduced are basically forgotten by the end. I also was somewhat annoyed with the Architect-like character at the end (remember him, from The Matrix?), where we get a lot of heavy, enigmatic plot reveal and then the book ends. It felt like I had to build my own fanfic ending in my head from the plot/revelations left hanging, as if the author didn't really have a clear idea of how to end things himself.

I don't know, clearly I'm missing something a lot of other people seemed to get. It looked like it was going to be a fun sci-fi ride, but the book missed the mark by lightyears somewhere along the way.

At some unspecified date in the not-near future, Abigail Gentian is a young woman who inherits a rich family business, specializing in human cloning.

She decides on an ambitious project, creating a thousand clones of herself, each imprinted with her own memories in full, to travel out and explore the galaxy in a thousand spaceships. Heedless of the family business that gave her the money to do this, she merges herself among the clones so that it's impossible to tell which one is really her, and goes out voyaging with them.

She's not the only one to take this route, but it's an exercise available only to the very rich, so there are relatively few groups of shatterlings (as they're known) venturing out into the galaxy.

They all have techniques of personal immortality, and also various methods of achieving suspended animation during long journeys. Reynolds respects the laws of physics, and so the spaceships in this book travel at sublight speeds, and journeys around the galaxy are very long indeed.

The shatterlings of Gentian Line travel around the galaxy (once around the galaxy is referred to as a circuit), stopping here and there to sample what's going on. Once per circuit, they all meet at a prearranged time and place, have a party, and exchange memories. I don't just mean that they chat: they have techniques for downloading memories, uploading memories, and managing memories spanning greater lengths of time than we can imagine. So they can all share each other's memories in a literal sense.

The plot of the story is that, for some reason initially unknown, some organization decides to exterminate Gentian Line. The traditional reunion party is ambushed and most of them are killed. The shocked survivors have to determine what happened and how to respond. It turns out that the ambush was not irrational: one of the Gentian shatterlings has unwittingly uncovered a potentially deadly secret, and their attackers believe themselves justified in their action, for reasons of galactic security (no less!).

Good points

Scenario: strong. I haven't seen this one before (extra points for originality), but in the context of the far future it's well imagined and plausible.

Characters: good. British sf authors are often better than American at characterization, if nothing else, and here we have some engaging and sometimes likeable characters. (Reynolds is a Welshman born in 1966.) I particularly like Purslane, the main female character. Note: Gentian shatterlings are of both sexes. Abigail wasn't inclined to limit herself to one, when two were available.

Writing style: good. These days sf is aspiring to higher literary standards than in the old days, and this one seems fully competitive to me.

Plot: perhaps not perfect, but it's interesting and exciting. Up to the standard of the book as a whole.

Not-so-good points

Anachronisms: most of the significant characters in this book are shatterlings of Gentian Line. Some six million years have passed since the birth of Abigail Gentian (who may or may not still be alive: as far as the book is concerned, this is unknowable). But the characters still talk and behave very much like the people we know today: they seem completely normal human beings. I doubt that this would really be the case. Six million years or more in the future, they still eat and drink things that would be completely familiar to us today: wine, coffee, croissants. Perhaps this is poetic licence, but I don't really buy it.

Privileged elite: is what the Gentian shatterlings are. Far richer individually than any normal being, their mode of existence is to joy-ride around the galaxy. They occasionally do good turns to civilizations they find on their way, whose whole lifespans are far less than theirs. Now and then they do some real work: they've somehow become experts on stardams, which are a way of enclosing stars that have gone nova, so that they don't destroy the surrounding area of space. The Gentians can't make stardams, which are relics of a long-dead but superior alien civilization; but they're experts in handling them. Because one stardam can preserve the existence of a whole civilization spanning many solar systems, I suppose they can make a lot of money this way. In whatever form money takes, that far in the future. Now, I'm not inclined to hate rich people: I'd like to be one of them, if I could. Nevertheless, a novel most of whose characters are filthy rich dilettantes leaves me feeling slightly uneasy, slightly alienated.

Replacement strategy: Despite their well-protected existences, every now and then a shatterling dies. About a hundred have gone by the start of the story (before the ambush). Why aren't they replaced? Surely Gentian Line wouldn't have lost the technology that started it off? Why not just make a new clone and download the stored memories into it? The shatterling is dead, long live the shatterling!

Subplot: the chapters of the book are interleaved with smaller flashback chapters in which Abigail Gentian, six million years in the past, gets addicted to a virtual reality game called Palatial, and almost loses her mind as she becomes entangled in it. Well, OK, but this seems to have no relevance to the main story, and I don't understand why it was included.

The rich get richer: is a sub-theme of the book. Gentian Line goes on and on and remains richer than most other groups, except the other similar Lines and a few abnormally persistent civilizations. I don't really buy this. Wealth is made to be squandered. Given sufficient time (six million years!), any family will run into a period of incompetence, be out-competed by upstarts, and sink into the general mass of humanity. Why not the Gentians?

Sentimentality: is a minor failing of an author who gets too fond of his pet characters. It's a rather endearing fault: there are many worse things that an author could be guilty of. It makes the ending of this book more agreeable but less plausible than it might have been. Take your choice.

Trivia

At one point in the book, the Gentians are embarrassed to encounter an ambassador from a distant civilization, because they happen to know that his entire civilization has been wiped out by an astronomical disaster. They don't like to tell him. Well, would you? (Come to think of it, it's not clear why the Gentians have the news but he hasn't. Ordinary radio waves travel at light speed.)

In the story you can find a spaceship named Fire Witch and two humanoid robots named Cadence and Cascade: clear signs that the author, born in 1966, has recently been listening to King Crimson albums released in 1969 and 1970. There are probably other amusing references that I don't happen to recognize.

Alastair Reynolds' boundless imagination is his superpower. This book is one mind-bending concept, after mind-boggling idea, after neato premise, after another. I first read, “Revelation Space” and was ready to give up on Reynolds as I quite disliked that novel (despite its universal praise). Now I realize that he was just getting his feet underneath him in Revelation Space and his best was yet to come - I'm glad I gave him another chance.

This book hooked me early and held me until the end. In a far future Abigail clones herself into 999 other 'shatterlings'. Although they share her gene structure the clones can be either male or female and the original person is somewhere among them. The clones then take to space in separate space ships and over the next several million years they regularly meet up.

The book is told from the viewpoint of two main characters who are both clones, one female and one male. They are in a relationship, which is generally frowned upon in the clone community. The original story of Abigail as a child and into adulthood is spread through the novel.

These two are both late to a reunion and find destroyed spaceships and the debris of battle floating in space. The goal then is to save who they can and to find the perpetrators and the reasons for the attack.

Reynolds has a way of holding a story together over the millions of years of narrative time. His writing expands into the endless space allowed for it by the intergalactic environment.

Great piece of hard sci-fi. A fantastic vision of where human civilization could be in millions of years, what life and consciousness means (I know, that is really common topic in sci-fi, but I have a soft point for not genocidal AIs ;) ). Moreover, one mind-boggling thing, which you normally probably don't realize is that due to the time scope of the book, it really shows how vast the universe is...