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

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One of Reynolds´single novels, it deals with immortality, childhood trauma through alternative upbringing involving simulations and AIs, an option how conglomerates could evolve, machine intelligence in the form of old and new robots, a crime in the past, future torture methods, and thereby unites anything that makes Sci-Fi great.

But when two of you see it… knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold and incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together… that’s worth more than one plus one. These aren´t rare too and Reynolds plays his astrophysics profession card more wisely and less hardcore than in the Revelation Space series, making it easier to follow, more focused on the great and heavily interwoven plot, so be focused while reading not to oversee the premises because Reynolds likes to puzzle with tiny pieces and each knows it´s place.

I rather like Revelation Space but in a muted sort of way, I thought the characters were on the flat side and a lot of the science went over my head. The stunning science would be no good without a good yarn to tell, and Reynolds excels himself on "House of Suns". 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.

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. Underneath the pages and pages of awkward dialogue is a plot that appears intricate at first but left me feeling underwhelmed at the end.Unwitting Instigator of Doom: It turns out that Campion is the one starting the chain of events that end up with the near-destruction of the Gentian Line due to the fact that on the circuit prior, he got some information out of Vigilance that, unknowing to him and most others, could be used to infer the existence of the First Machines. Ungovernable Galaxy: No interstellar society has persisted for more than a few hundred thousand years courtesy of there being no Faster-Than-Light Travel or Subspace Ansible technology; empires have formed then slowly started to unravel and break apart from internal or external pressures and have done so for the past six million years. Screw Yourself: Campion and Purslane are lovers, and being shatterlings, they were both created with the same initial set of memories from Abigail. What’s more, they are due to be very, very tardy to the next Gentian Line reunion, at which memories and experiences will be shared among their fellows over the course of 1000 nights. I suppose this is true of all fiction, but I find it particularly so with the genres of Speculative Fiction, which are after all, more interested in investigating the “other” than fiction firmly rooted in the realm of realism often is.

We'd probably be seeing it half a dozen civilisations down the line, when the Ymirians will just be a memory.As Campion and the shatterlings are pursuing Purslane's hijacked ship, transmissions from Neume confirm that a shatterling within their midst, Galingale, is the traitor and a secret member of the House of Suns. Due to the wormhole's relative youth and instability, Campion arrived over 20,000 years after Silver Wings.

There's a major space action sequence, that finally adds a lot of tension, then many, many, more pages of dialogue about everything that just happened. Families, Lines in this work, and old money that are specializing in future industries in one sector and becoming galactic or universal market leaders can be one option, but I would subjectively think that conglomerates and especially single, market listed megacorporations that are the first ones and have extremely rigid and deadly anti industrial espionage systems will be king. To humanity, an only child growing up in an ancient and demon-haunted house, it was like discovering a new friend. The plot of the book is primarily driven by the assumption that the First Machines would want revenge for what was done to them. Some readers may definitively be disappointed because it´s still very detailed and filled with science facts, characterization, dialogues, and whatever protagonist keen readers are into is secondary after the worldbuilding, fractions, retrospections, and especially the families and the idea of how wealth could keep accumulating in space.The exceptions are the first chapter and seven others, told by Abigail, long, long ago, until her story catches up with the main one.

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