House of Suns (original 2008; edition 2009)

...I do think that Reynolds packed perhaps a bit too much ideas into this volume though. The implications of most things we see are usually only glimpsed at. He simply doesn't have enough space in this book to properly explore them. The pace of the story simply won't allow it. I find myself torn between the sheer enjoyment on being dragged along with the story and the nagging voice telling me Reynolds is glossing over the details. It is a much smoother read than some of his earlier novels but in the process, it has lost some of what I liked about those as well. It is an intriguing novel and a thoroughly absorbing read, but when you get right down to it, there is quite a bit of unfulfilled potential in the book as well. Personally, I can't entirely shake that feeling and completely lose myself in the book. House of Suns is entertaining, thrilling even, but not all it might have been. For the fan of space opera, it is still a very fine read however. One I would definitely recommend to fans of the sub genre.

Full Random Comments review ( )

'They made it for war,' the little boy told me as we stepped out of the green portal, back into the playroom. 'You know that, don't you?'
'They made what for war?'
The game . . . Palatial.' He still had something of Count Mordax about him - there was a haughty disregard in his voice, above and beyond his usual predilection for teasing. 'It was for soldiers, the same ones your family helped to clone. They went inside Palatial and got memories of being in the war, even though they'd only just been grown. By the time they went into battle, they had as much experience and knowledge as if they'd been fighting for years.'

The story of the downfall of the Gentian Line and what happened next, is told by two shatterlings of the line, Campion and Purslane. Each chapter is split into three sections, with the other section narrated by Abigail Gentian, the originator of the Gentian Line, whose family had made its fortune in providing cloned soldiers in wartime. Having grown up in an asteroid-covering version of the Winchester Mystery House, with her development delayed, so that her childhood was extended by thirty years, Abigail eventually decided to created 1000 male and female clones of herself and send them out to explore the galaxy. Six million years later the remaining shatterlings are still crisscrossing the galaxy, and the Lines have become one of the major power structures of the galaxy.

The story of the boy Abigail played Palatial with, was a bit of a red herring. To start with I though that Abigail having forgotten his name, was to do with the secret of the House of Suns, and maybe he was the founder of that line. Later in the book, when it became clear that the boy had never recovered from the mental breakdown caused by Palatial malfunctioning, I thought that maybe the boy had moved on from playing Count Mordax to playing the original Ghost Soldier, and had either been unable to switch characters again after the Ghost Soldier's soul had been magically replicated in thousands of identical Ghost Soldiers, or that his final breakdown had come when the magician destroyed the Ghost Soldiers. But now I think that Abigail's memories of feeling incredible guilt over destroying the Ghost Soldiers, were actually the only way that the shatterlings' repressed memories could seep out, so it represented their guilt and not Abigail's guilt for something that after all only happened in a game.

In some ways I liked this more than the Revelation Space books, as the main characters did not do such stupid things so I didn't find them as annoying. Although this is currently a stand-alone novel, I would certainly read another book about the Gentian Line, or one of the other Lines, if Alastair Reynolds were to write one. However, Campion and Purslane's sections were narrated in very similar style, so it was never clear to begin with which of them was telling that part of the story, but that's probably because they were clones, rather than being due to bad writing. ( )

House of Suns is a stand-alone novel, and deals with grand themes in the true hard science fiction tradition. Cloning, AI/machine intelligence, and galaxy-spanning action make this a space opera truly worthy of that title. Oh, and Lazarus Long could learn a bit about longevity from the principle characters!

The structure of the book has a framing device at the outset of each section, with the main chapters being offered from alternating viewpoints. The section-opening story elements are quite good, but I think they are probably why the book just failed to make the top score in my assessment. The main body whips you along speedily from set-piece to set-piece, each of which is entirely satisfying. The cloning/longevity tie-in paints a picture of the far future which is quite novel, and I particularly liked the back-story around the genesis of the 'Spirit of the Air'. In general the quality of the writing easily met the standards I have come to expect from Alastair Reynolds.

Can't thing of a reason why I wouldn't thoroughly recommend this to anyone, other than my general moan that books are produced in a large format nowadays that makes them particularly clumsy to handle: bring back the old-size paperback! ( )

Some people say that you learn something from every book you read. If that's true, "House of Suns" taught me that hard science fiction might not be my cup of tea. As others have noted, Reynolds does a good job of demonstrating the very enormity of both space and time. His characters, who are often millions of years old, often place themselves in stasis for centuries at a time while their ships carry them across the unfathomable distances that separate the stars while civilizations rise and fall around them with depressing regularity. They can essentially speed up and slow down time as they see fit, but also face the problem of trying to maintain coherent personalities while they sort through millions of years of communal memories. This is an interesting idea, and literature has touched on it before: we might consider Reynolds's characters to be hypertrophic versions of Clarissa Dalloway, who only had to organize six or so decades of experience during the course of a single afternoon. Still, Reynolds only skims the surface of this material without really exploring how this might affect human consciousness. It doesn't help that his own writing isn't any more than serviceable, and that his pacing is somewhat inconsistent: he seems to skip ahead during sequences that might bore some readers and the book's last few scenes seem rushed. "House of Suns" isn't a short book, but I think it'd take a few volumes to properly flesh out all of the ideas that Reynolds has introduced here. Reynolds doesn't seem to have the time, even if his characters might.

Another thing that bothered me about "House of Suns" was its universe's riotous abundance. Literature, like most of human life, is usually defined by its limitations, and one of those necessary limitations is material: there just isn't enough stuff for everyone, and it's unlikely to last forever. Jane Austen wouldn't have had a career if it was otherwise. In "House of Suns," though, the galaxy seems to have been completely colonized by a set of technologically advanced first-world civilizations, and most people can order up just about whatever they want from the nearest "maker," which organizes matter into anything you might need, be it a cool glass of white wine or a laser gun. This unbelievable prosperity seem to rob this narrative of much of its meaning, though. In a world where both death and poverty have been roundly defeated, how could anything that happened be taken particularly seriously? In short, the formless ennui that threatens some of ennui that threatens some of this novel's characters began to threaten me. I've seen some reviewers say that it was nice to read a contemporary science fiction tome that didn't assume that our future is necessarily dystopic, but I feel that "House of Suns" moves the goalposts – or redesigns the playing field – a bit too much.

"House of Suns" isn't completely without its admirable qualities, though. The author skilfully weaves in a storyline concerning the founder of a "line" of clones playing a medieval-themed virtual reality-style game into the book's central plot, and the book is briskly paced and fun to read, with space battles and galaxy-wide conspiratorial intrigue to spare. Its treatment of science is, as far as I can tell, relatively realistic, and Reynolds introduces a fine selection of post-human or quasi-human intelligences, interesting and beautiful alternatives to the sort of consciousness we're familiar with. Still, I suspect that I'll leave this one for the genre's real fans and beam back to literary fiction. I'm gonna leave these sorts of interstellar adventures to somebody else. ( )

Refreshing to read a futuristic book that is not a Dystopia, and the scope of this one is huge, spanning millions of years. There were some minor weaknesses for me in the plotting, but overall I really enjoyed it, though the ending seemed a tad abrupt. The Kindle edition had some formatting issues, the most annoying being that the section breaks within chapters did not show any break, instead the first paragraph of the break had no indention, often making it appear to be part of the preceding paragraph. ( )