Name: Stephen Gill 's review of House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
Item: House of Suns
Rating: 5
Author: Stephen Gill

Alastair Reynolds

A spectacular, large-scale space opera - the ultimate galaxy-spanning adventureSix million years ago, at the very dawn of the starfaring era, Abigail Gentian fractured herself into a thousand male and female clones: the shatterlings. Sent out into the galaxy, these shatterlings have stood aloof as they document the rise and fall of countless human empires. They meet every two hundred thousand years, to exchange news and memories of their travels with their siblings.Campion and Purslane are not only late for their thirty-second reunion, but they have brought along an amnesiac golden robot for a guest. But the wayward shatterlings get more than the scolding they expect: they face the discovery that someone has a very serious grudge against the Gentian line, and there is a very real possibility of traitors in their midst. The surviving shatterlings have to dodge exotic weapons while they regroup to try to solve the mystery of who is persecuting them, and why - before their ancient line is wiped out of existence, forever.

House of Suns

Stephen Gill 

A spectacular, large-scale space opera - the ultimate galaxy-spanning adventure Six million years ago, at the very dawn of the starfaring era, Abigail Gentian fractured herself into a thousand male and female clones: the shatterlings. Sent out into the galaxy, these shatterlings have stood aloof as they document the rise and fall of countless human empires. They meet every two hundred thousand years, to exchange news and memories of their travels with their siblings. Campion and Purslane are not only late for their thirty-second reunion, but they have brought along an amnesiac golden robot for a guest. But the wayward shatterlings get more than the scolding they expect: they face the discovery that someone has a very serious grudge against the Gentian line, and there is a very real possibility of traitors in their midst. The surviving shatterlings have to dodge exotic weapons while they regroup to try to solve the mystery of who is persecuting them, and why - before their ancient line is wiped out of existence, forever.

Tobias V. Langhoff

I originally gave this book five stars, but while writing this review I realized it had some deep flaws I couldn’t look past. Even so, I greatly enjoyed reading this exhilarating tour de force. I feel the author is beginning to find his voice here; the book is just as exciting as his previous ones, but slightly less meandering.

Alastair Reynolds is a man of great ideas. A former astrophysicist, his best books are sweeping space operas with true alien concepts and technologies, presented in a believable manner. In this one, we follow a branch of humanity that has survived unchanged while travelling through the Milky Way for the last 6 million years. Truly epic stuff.

As in his other books, the dialogue is very formal and stiff, and the characters have shallow and similar personalities (although in this book I guess that can be hand-waved away by the fact that most of the characters are clones of the same person). The dialogue is also expositional and repetitive; as an example, if a character is privy to some piece of information that we as the reader also already know, but a second character does not, it is explained to the other character on paper in great detail.

The pacing is fairly good, better than most of Reynolds’s other books, but there are still some odd cliffhangers and mysteries that are resolved far too quickly (and often, the main characters’ first theory is proven to be correct) to leave much impression.

Parallel to the main story, a fictional side story unfolds through flashbacks. Not unlike WatchmenWatchmen, it functions as a metaphor or foil to the main story, although it’s hard to really grasp its significance and the reason for its inclusion, although it all relates to deep questions about memory and identity, much like in Reynolds's Chasm City. Some loose threads include: (view spoiler)[Was the boy who was an heir to the robotics family Abraham Valmik, and/or did he somehow create the First Machines? Why does Abigail not remember his name, was it purged together with the rest of the knowledge of the First Machines for that reason? Did the events in Palatial (which clearly mirrored the Lines' genocide of the First Machines) occur, or were they implanted/changed memories in the Gentian Line's strands to hide the truth in their altered past? (hide spoiler)] The same goes for some of the earlier parts of the plot, which feel a bit like red herrings ((view spoiler)[like the Doctor Meninx subplot (hide spoiler)]).

The transition from the developing mystery/whodunnit in relatively (on a galactic scale, at least) close quarters, to the famous near-lightspeed chase scene that lasts thousands of years, is a bit jarring. It’s all grounded in a warming relationship between the two main characters, however.

A final random thought: There are no aliens in this book, but a conflict between organics and sentient machines that reminded me of a central plotline in Mass Effect – which, in turn, reminds me of the Inhibitors in Reynolds’s early work Revelation Space.

altlovesbooks

"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.

(view spoiler)[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. (hide spoiler)]

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.

Shona Tiger

3.5; up to 4 because Big Concepts! Very slow start, somewhat confusing middle bits, and I was a little disappointed by the end (wanted more resolution, I suppose); but I really enjoyed this, by the last few chapters. Great story.

Cindy Lieberman

** spoiler alert **
           Alistair Reynolds is an inventive world builder and this stand-alone novel doesn’t disappoint. It centers on a pair Gentian clones who arrive at their 1,000-clone reunion late, only to find that most of their line has been wiped out in an attack. This story alternates with the story of Abigail from whom all of the Gentian-line clones derived. The main clone story is the search to find the people (or machines) responsible as well as the reason for their actions. The book’s themes include political influence, weapons of war, race oppression, trust, love and forgiveness. Chase scenes and mysteries abound! My only suggestion is that with the audiobook it was difficult to tell which of the clones was narrating, as their voices are understandably similar. Having female and male narrators would have improved it. I’ve only recently heard of Mr Reynolds (I’ve now read the first two novels of his most recent series) and I look forward to reading many more of his books.

A really enjoyable saga that stretches over eons.

"I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.

I was a girl then, a single individual called Abigail Gentian."

This is such a fantastic novel! It explores memory, identity, culpability, love among two clones of the same person, intimacy, gender, human potential, and VAST time frames (while staying closely with the main characters). Its setting is the entire galaxy and beyond, it has a good murder mystery, fantastic other kinds of mysteries, creepy but lovable AIs, convincing villains who have a point, weird alien humans of the far future, action scenes in space, tense hide-and-seek, *beautiful prose*, memorable characters - I loved it SO MUCH. 

I wish every book was like this and I can't wait to read more Alastair Reynolds. I've been making myself wait and try other new-to-me authors that many people think are great but really I'm just chomping at the bit to read more Reynolds. I just hope the rest of his books come close to this one. 

If you absolutely want to hear a quibble because nothing can be *that* deliciously perfect: I could have done without the chase scene at the end, but the 'wah-wah-where-is-the-action' crowd loved that scene in particular, so I guess it was the correct choice to include it. I would have preferred even *more* philosophizing and exploring these cool ideas even further, because Reynolds's thoughts are actually really fascinating and worth thinking about. But the chase scene also shows that he knows what he's doing and how to appeal to a vast array of different kinds of reader, so I don't mind it at all. In addition, it was actually a tense chase scene and I'm the girl who always falls asleep during car chases in movies, so that says a lot. Other quibbles? I was so invested in the present-day story line and mysteries that I sometimes didn't want to go into one of the childhood flashbacks - but that feeling always vanished right away, and the flashbacks were deeply meaningful in the way this memory tried to communicate a deleted and suppressed *other* memory (and answer to one of the mysteries) in symbolic form. So brilliant! So freaking beautiful! So no, I can't really find any flaw with this book and can find so much genius instead. 

I'm so happy this is a prolific author who's written a lot of other books already, so I've got a lot to look forward to.

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The award-winning author of the Revelation Space trilogy presents a spectacular, galaxy-spanning space opera with a very human heart.

Stephen Gill &
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

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