House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds - spoiler-free review

If you want a one-line review, here it is: House of Suns is like We Are Legion (We Are Bob)... just way more exciting.

House of Suns is technically a hard sci-fi space opera. Technically. But that generic description doesn’t do this galactic murder mystery justice. Let’s start with the premise. Six million years before the story’s main plot, Abigail Gentian created 1000 clones (aka, “shatterlings”) of herself and sent them out across the galaxy. Every once in a while (say, a couple hundred thousand years) the shatterlings reunite and exchange memories from their adventures in space. But at the latest reunion, the Gentian Line is ambushed. Most of the shatterlings are killed. And that’s where House of Suns begins. The book follows two plot lines, one about the shatterlings and how they search out answers and revenge and one about Abigail Gentian and her story up until she cloned herself.

Alastair Reynolds did an awesome job balancing action, interesting characters and a mysterious plot with truly fascinating science. The idea of a drug that you can squirt into your eyes that will then slow down your perception of time, allowing you to experience a few seconds while thousands of years pass in the universe, keeping you alive and sane while you travel across thousands of light years? That’s just dope. There’s a lot of dope science in this book. While reading I felt my perception of space and time shift to match the galactic scale that the shatterlings experience. For them it’s nothing to be put into stasis for a few thousand years while they travel or to receive messages about events years after they’ve occurred. Reynold’s brilliance is how well he gets his readers to enter this world of scales we have absolutely no experience with.

There are sentient robots in this book, robots who have a fascinatingly different philosophy than humans do. Multiple times in HOS a robot has pointed out that revenge is “that most pointlessly biological of imperatives”. There is no point in revenge because it doesn’t change what happened or fix anything or make anyone feel much better. If robots aren’t your thing, there are also wormholes and a being called The Spirit of the Air, something that used to be a person before he translated each of his neurons into a computer. Then he remade himself so that he was leagues beyond what any computer—let alone person—could keep up with. (How lonely!) After that he made himself transcend physical limitations by splitting himself into independent neurons that powered themselves on the very vacuum of space.

The story sets up lots of questions: What happened to Andromeda? Who betrayed the Line? Why were they betrayed? And why the heck does that robot have a single human arm? I was immediately invested in the story and couldn’t wait to find answers. The questions kept me reading through the slightly boring portions, and there was plenty of action to balance out the boring. I think a good judge of whether I enjoyed a book is if the answers I had at the outset of the story were answered in a satisfying, surprising way. The answers in House of Suns didn’t disappoint.

Five stars.

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