The characters are just as bland as their dialogue, with motivations and loyalties that are either cliched or bewildering. Die Welt ist typisch Reynolds: epische Science Fiction, in Zeit und Raum gigantisch, aber trotzdem stimmig. right over my head, this is to be expected as I have difficulty figuring out how dental floss works. inverarity One-line summary: An intergalactic mystery with intrigue, betrayal, and illicit romance spanning six million years. The Machine People, as a species, are already some four million years old by the time we meet Hesperus, and Reynolds is not interested in getting bogged down in explaining how they came to exist, preferring instead to arrange all his pieces on the board and just let them interact with each other rather than expounding on how they all got there.

The stunning science would be no good without a good yarn to tell, and Reynolds excels himself on "House of Suns". House of Suns is set in a different universe than the Revelation Space series, and centres on a group (family? First pic - the dogs impatiently waiting in their cage to be allowed to explore their temporary home. I would absolutely love another novel set in this universe, and the point at which this novel arrives could be seen as a great widening of that universe’s potential scope.

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. Human Popsicle: Since all travel has to be done STL, all biological travelers are put in abeyance, stasis field where passage of time inside can be tuned to be significantly slower than the outside. 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. I guess future aliens will have much fun playing around with the most important factor of human society just as nowadays secret reptilian overlords that are already there.

This is apparently a big no-no, and considering how significant it was in the story, I found the reasons unconvincing. Keeping the story in a pacey "first-person" format, he alternates the viewpoint between the two main characters, as well as filling in some introductory background from the perspective of a third person during the preamble to each f the book's parts.The scale of some of the conceptual elements was so broad that I initially had some difficulty finding a handhold to comprehend them. It was indeed – it uses the setting and some characters from the novella Thousandth Night (which I haven’t read). This is my second Alastair Reynolds book, the first being Revelation Space which is his debut novel published 8 years before House of Suns.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. With stasis failing, Hesperus decides to protect Purslane by remodeling himself into a stasis equipped landing pod, sacrificing his personality and memories in the process. The entries for very advanced tech levels were rather obtuse and never really given much detail as to how the technology worked or what it enabled. I was born in a house with thousands of books, in a small, quiet village, on the edge of a former empire of conquering and commerce.For some reason this book has been out of print in the US for a few years, making a physical copy a little tedious to come by, but I did eventually find one. The House of Suns erased all references to the event from history and maintain a conspiracy to keep it that way. The whole thing is written in first person, with two main point of view characters in alternating chapters. I’ve read and enjoyed quite a few of their Alastair Reynolds, but not this one, which they took to university, and which I’ve just borrowed.