House of Suns

It is easy to start wanting too much from futuristic writers like Reynolds. House of Suns dragged for me for most of the first half, but then became very interesting indeed, only to end abruptly just as great things beckoned. How might a truly advanced sentience play out its existence, I wonder? Better character development than I'd found in the early Reynolds novels, although I'd rather have seen the most interesting character survive. Bit too cutesy the ending.

I picked this one up based on the stellar reviews. I've read a few by Reynolds in the past, the most recent being Absolution Gap which was a bit of a slog to get through in certain parts. But this one was exemplary from page one to the end. All loose ends are tied up very neatly and I definitely recommend it to lovers of harder sci-fi.

As usual, Alastair Reynolds paints a rich universe of fantastic far future science fiction. More focused and complete than some of his other works, it wraps up well but also leaves it open enough to continue. I really enjoyed this one.

A terrific read. Reynolds' best work in my opinion. My complaints (limited as they are) about Reynlods have generally centered on his sometimes weak endings and occasionally flat characters. This book has none of those "flaws" (and I hesitate to use that term as Reynolds is a fabulous writer all around). If you like hard SF, you will like this book. Guaranteed.

This is an imaginative and satisfying work of science fiction. Reynolds creates a world that feels at once fantastic and believable. Both the character and plot arcs are well paced, and having resolutions that feel earned and complete. In particular, his desire to obey the constraints of relativistic speeds while still providing a galaxy-spanning opera leads to a number of novel and fascinating plot developments that seem to emerge organically from the universe he creates.

I was gripped in particular by one theme that was endemic to the way Reynolds tells his story: that of the relationship between the value of a civilization and its longevity. The main characters in this book are part of a civilization who live lives that stretch millions of years, much of which is spent travelling at relativistic speeds in something like a coma. From their own perspective, this historical omnipresence makes them one of the greatest civilizations ever to have existed. Yet, unlike some relatively ephemeral civilizations, they have made few works which leave an enduring mark, and remain relatively disconnected from the politics and struggles of the rest of the galaxy. This provokes several questions: What's the mark of a truly great civilization? Is mere endurance sufficient, or must there be impact?

Despite the engaging plot, and rich thematic exploration, the book is far from perfect. Reynold's work falters in the quality of the writing itself. He frequently falls back on bland, repetitive language and structure. The writing is, at times, amateurish. He misuses words, for example. On p. 97, he writes that no civilization is "known to possess... sophistry in vacuum manipulation..." Clearly he means "sophistication," not "sophistry" (unless there are rhetorical requirements on manipulating vacuums that I don't understand). This isn't the only instance of this sort of mistake, and all are distracting.

I should also note that the Kindle version has numerous typos. Dozens and dozens. Either no one at the publisher read it after it was scanned into an electronic form, or worse, they didn't care. I don't want to take off any stars for this, but the publisher should be held accountable for quality control.

The best thing about Reynolds is he sticks to sci-fi that while definitely in the realm of far in the future tech, is still believable. No different here, and a great story surrounding it.

I do wish that the ending was either a bit more wrapped up or we had a sequel already, but a great book all the same.

Pretty standard stuff. Characters are rather two dimensional and the science is on the soft side. Dialog is pretty gee-whizz - tho it employs a Little Lord Fauntelroy English to dress it up fairytale style.Reynolds tries to make the story BIGGER THAN LIFE - by inserting MILLIONS OF YEARS and BILLIONS OF MILES between every 6th and 7th paragraph tho the passage of these years does absolutely nothing to further the plot. It's very light reading. Kind of Wizard Of Oz with a lot of much employed science fiction tropes layered on top. It's an easy read - but not terribly satisfying for those with long familiarity with the genre.

This is my first and possibly last Alastair Reynolds book. Previously I had been reading a bunch of Iain M Banks and Greg Egans.

The story itself was fine (probably good, even), but the characters were not. They frequently acted in unbelievably irrational ways that seemed like blatant mechanisms to push the plot forward. This might have been explained away with sufficient character development, the latter didn't exist.

I was looking forward to reading this based on the opening, but was rather disappointed. Sure, scifi is frequently unbelievable, but some of this pushed beyond my ability to suspend my disbelief. Plus I found the relationship between the protagonists disturbing as it was incestuous, etc.

This novel was a little unforgiving in the way it introduces you into the universe Alastair Reynolds has created but it more than makes up for it with some interesting future tech ideas and great interplay between the characters. I love the depth he is able to give to even his supporting characters and by the end of this book you really do care about the lives he has created.

After 2 brilliant novels at the beginning of his career - Revelation Space and Chasm City, Mr. Reynolds' novels became either incomplete or just showing flashes of brilliance combined with lots of forget it run of the mill action. The short stories and novellas showed an extraordinary brilliance though and I've wondered if he would ever write a novel commensurate with them

House of Suns is that novel - epic space opera on a large scale but with characters you can identify with, hard sf based on the current understanding of the limits of science and a touch of fantasy and romance to complete it.

Based on the Thousandth Night novella published in the 1M AD anthology, with the same universe and characters, though different action, the story takes place in a mostly human dominated Galaxy 6M years in the future, with everything allowed except causality busting - so no ftl - moving planets out of danger, Dyson spheres, cloning, intelligent robots, immortality, matter replicators, damming stars - anything conceivable today that stays within the limits of our physical understanding of the Universe is there.

Civilizations rise and fall, but towering over them are the Lines, groupings of originally 1000 immortal shatterlings though in time some are lost to attrition - all clones of a single person to start with - that have the most advanced ships, tech, and go on Circuits around the Galaxy, meeting once every 200k years to mix their memories. Of course travel being sub-light they spend most time in stasis or slow-time - they can and do slow time at will with "syncromesh", so of those 6 Million years each shatterling lived several tens of thousands - bookworms tunneling through the pages of history as they are called by entities that actually lived through millions of years though at a slow pace

The shatterlings are almost as benevolent gods to the "turnover" civilizations of the Galaxy and they trade and do good works like preventing stars to go supernova, moving planets out of harm's way...

The story focuses on 3 main characters - 2 shatterlings of the Gentian line Campion and Purslane - Campion is brash and just on the right side of censure for various actions or inactions - Purslane has the best ship of the Gentian line and is patient and determined, making a good match with her illicit lover Campion - the shatterlings are supposed to go alone on their circuits and not form bonds...

Also in small restropect chunks we get to see the original Gentian, Abigail, millions of years ago in The Golden Hour - that's a literal name - when humanity lived in the Solar system only and the shatterling project originated and some of how the Lines formed.

Purslane and Campion meeting illicitly on their way to the next Gentian reunion and preparing to falsify their memories before dumping them in the common mix, stop by an obscure planet to fix a stardam put in place to prevent a supernova extinction of the local civilization.

Being late to the meeting, they detour to fix Campion's ship, and in the process rescue a strange robot of the machine people - Hesperus - with missing memories. Finally on their way to the reunion, they get a very disturbing message and the adventure begins...

The ending is fulfilling, leaving space for a sequel if the author desires but completing the story very nicely.

Nobody plots the far future like Reynolds. A timescape of vast dimensions with characters that actually have character, including the robots. Some plot churning in the middle, but by the end, left me wanting more.

As a long time connoisseur of sci-fi, fantasy and adventure the one thing I really crave is genuine scope... a real WOW factor that moves, humbles and inspires you. I like to stretch the speculation of speculative fiction as far as possible. (I'm the one guy who liked Star Trek: The Movie, because they took the time to develop a sense of how small man is in the universe) While there are galaxies of great stories out there and many more being churned out daily, few have done that for me. House of Suns will probably be my new benchmark for some time; it is one of very few tales where I genuinely felt that at the end I could flip to the start and immediately read it again. The science is as solid as most sci-fi fans will need without being cumbersome or distracting, with enough "impossible" goodies left over to keep you awestuck. The primary characters are human, so there is a good sense of reliability, but even the non-humans have a sense of "humane" warmth and moral self-preservation that you don't really know who (or if) the "bad" guys are. I love that the "shatterlings" are virtually omnipotent superhumans who control and construct some of the biggest and grandest of the galaxies structures over periods of time that dwarf the existence of entire empires and yet they have human interactions and foibles like any other. Huge achievements have the potential for huge failure! At the heart of the story is forbidden love, but there's also a blossoming whodunit to be solved which may ultimately have galactic consequences. Every time I thought I could predict where the story was going and that the grandest of twists were sadly behind me, I was happily wrong. Based on my enjoyment of this book, I've just started on "Terminal World" and will probably seek out AR novels frequently.

This book is... not great. There's some really interesting ideas spaced out by really boring and honestly needless filler. There is a whole sequence of flashbacks to the childhood of the main character that never-ever-relates to anything. I want to say it's maybe a hundred pages of the book. Maybe it just felt like 100 pages. It almost feels like after the book was written the publisher said, "It's too short, write me a 100 pages." So the author just took a failed short story, and carelessly spaced it out in the book. It's an okay short story, but really has no business being there.

The pace of the book was really odd too. You'd get a really nice buildup, then an incredible slow down... Painstakingly slow, so slow I wish I could get one of those time-slowing synchomesh's. Then another nice buildup to... incredible slowness.

And the ending. No spoilers, but what a huge buildup to nothing much.

In the far future, Campion and Purslane are members of Gentian Line. Members of Lines flit through the galaxy (and the intervening years, because even in the far future superluminal travel is still only a dream) in ships many kilometers long and help protect Humanity's many divergent cultures from natural disasters like supernovae. Every two hundred thousand years, the 800+ surviving members of Gentian Line (originally the Line had consisted of a thousand clones of its founder, Abigail Gentian, but through the course of the millennia, some members were lost to attrition) gather to share stories and strands...the accumulated memories of each member of the Line are implanted into the minds of the other members. When it comes time for the thirty-second reunion of Gentian Line, Campion and Purslane arrive late. Normally, a tardy arrival (50+ years) would have incurred censure from the other members of the Line, but this time Campion and Purslane arrive at the reunion system to find that the planet the get-together was supposed to take place on has been destroyed. Running for their lives, Campion, Purslane and the handful of other survivors of the massacre must escape the forces determined to put an end to Gentian Line and determine why the Line had been targeted for extinction.

Set in a future six million years distant, House of Suns is everything a reader has come to expect from Alastair Reynolds. A galaxy-spanning Human civilization held together by advanced -- yet believable -- technology, genetically modified people taking on copious forms, and just a hint of an ancient culture of aliens that long ago disappeared but whose artifacts were left behind for Humanity to come along and deal with millions (or billions?) of years later. (Reynolds' even pays homage to Larry Niven's Ringworld in a unique way.)

Reynolds' Milky Way of the distant future makes turning pages inexorable and easy. Once again, the author's vision of the future is utterly plausible and just a bit disturbing. House of Suns is highly recommended and will leave you wanting more.

On my continuing mission to find some modern Sci-Fi that I enjoy as much as the classics from the likes of Azimov, Harrison, Pohl, Aldiss and the rest, I have recently been stumbling around rather unsuccessfully. I obviously encountered the incomparable Iain M. Banks back in the late 80's but I have never found anyone else with his depth and scope of imagination.

Until, that is, I happened across Alistair Reynolds while browsing for new (to me) authors. What a find! I suppose this book could be summed up as an ultimately intergalactic space opera action mystery love story, but that doesn't do it justice. The shatterling concept, by itself, is brilliantly original, but the characterisation and galaxy & millennia spanning narrative are simply magnificent. I'm not entirely sure the early life of Abigail Gentian and her subsequent Palatial obsession adds an awful lot to the story, but inasmuch as they pertain to her personality and that of her shatterlings, they are relevant and add depth to the narrative. There are, of course, nuggets gently borrowed from other masterpieces of the genre, but these are in no way derivative; more of a respectful homage to earlier masters.

6 million years ago Abigail Gentian cloned herself a thousand times and sent her copies out into the galaxy to collect knowledge and experience and share in all that they could find. 6 million years later, Abigail's civilisation is long gone but over 800 of her shatterlings still roam through space and every circuit they meet to collate knowledge, reminisce and party.

Arriving late to the latest gathering two, somewhat wayward shatterlings, find the rendezvous planet in dust, destroyed by massive, ancient weaponry. The last remnants of Abigail Gentians massacred line flee and set about finding out just who, or what, wanted them all dead.

House of Suns rattles along at a pretty good rate in a believable if not so fantastic universe. In Reynolds' Commonality speed of light travel hasn't been subsumed into the story by frivolous and baffling science: space travel still takes millennia. Thankfully, human artifice has reached a level that micro machines, drugs and cryogenics provide a solution to the immense distances involved in pan-galactic gargle blasting. Here too are a variety of exotic species, sentient machines, huge spaceships and entirely believable, gargantuan works and constructions: the power of stars and supernovae harnessed like intergalactic hydraulics; suns contained, switched off.

Regardless of setting, the story itself is quite old-school and could easily translate to the old West, to a war movie or even a modern political thriller scenario; hopefully that speaks of the strengths of the story rather than its familiarity. Reynolds pulls in several wonderfully diverse characters and interweaves an intriguing back story explaining Abigail Gentian and her line. And the journey the remnant of Gentian's shatterlings take is certainly worth investing in.

If it isn't perhaps as exciting a galaxy as some others it is nonetheless satisfying and wonderfully populated and Reynolds plays out his whodunit with intrigue, wit and style that is easy to read and thoroughly enjoyable.

Set six million years in the future, "House of Suns" follows two of the 1000 clone descendants of Abigail Gentian as they return for their annual reunion to share what they've learned in their travels across the galaxy. Campion and Purslane show up 50 years late for the reunion they discover their line almost wiped out of existance by members of the mysterious House of Suns. Assisted by their guest Hesperus (a member of the machine race) in escaping, the trio reconvene with the 49 survivors of the Gentian line. They discover that the attack was due to a secret one of them has unknowingly discovered in their travels. They uncover evidence that there may be a traitor among them as someone is still picking them off one-by-one and trying to make these killings appear to be accidents.

Alaster Reynolds remains a very talented novelist but the same flaws that often dogs his other novels appear here as well; "House of Suns" could have used a stronger editor to insist on at least 100 pages be trimmed from the novel as the middle section sags. The conclusion of the novel seems rushed as well given all the build up and readers are left hanging waiting for a sequel to give us more information on the fate ouf our heroes.

Having said that (and having enjoyed the novel in spite of its flaws), "House of Suns" also demonstrates Reynolds continuing evolution as a writer. The ambitious novel told in alternating chapters from the point-of-view of three characters and in eight parts, has an interesting mystery at its core but Reynolds occasionally gets side tracked with details that aren't part of the plot or even the subplots of the novel.

"House of Suns" isn't probably the best novel to start with if you haven't read Reynolds before (I'd recommend Revelation Spacebut it is an entertaining if bloated read.

Even though I love science fiction/speculative fiction, I am not normally a big fan of space opera; I mean, I read the Star Trek and Star Wars novels when I was in my teens, and Doctor Who when I was older. But not any independent space opera. Then I stumbled across this book. This is a novel independent of Alastair Reynolds's other universes, a one shot deal. In the distant future, clones man starships that can travel close to the speed of light; to survive these long voyages to the stars, the pilots either suspend or freeze themselves during the trip. Humanity has been in space for six to seven million years. But all travel is relativistic; there are no warp drives or hyperspace mechanisms. So space flights can take tens of thousands of years. Then, one line of clones is mysteriously attacked. As the pilots of this House attempt to discover why they were targeted for genocide, the story flashes back to the life path of the woman who started this particular line of clones and their voyage into the depths of space. There are no slow parts; the story runs at near light speed, one shock after another.

I tried looking for more space opera like this, afterwards, but there isn't any. Even Reynolds's other novels don't come close to House of Suns. Buy it; cherish it.

Purslane and Campion are two Gentian shatterlings from the House of Flowers, two of a thousand clones of Abigail Gentian who left the solar system around the year 3000 to travel and explore the galaxy. All shatterlings meet up for their thousand nights reunion during which they share memories of what they have experienced.

Six million years have passed since the first ships left the solar system and due to the technology available the shatterlings are effectively immortal. They can pass the hundreds of years travelling between star systems in stasis and experience anything the galaxy has to offer.

On their belated way to the next reunion, Campion and Purslane receive a message warning them not to enter the chosen system and to flee to a designated safe system. The Gentian line were ambushed, almost their entire number wiped out and only a few dozen managing to escape and make their way to Neume where they await any stragglers.

Why does someone want the Gentian Shatterlings dead? Is there a traitor in their midst that helped this atrocity? And what exactly is the House of Suns?

This is the story we follow in House of Suns. Travelling with Campion and Purslane while they visit some systems on their way to the reunion, the aftermath of the attack and the events that follow. The first thing that you need to get used to is the timeframe of the novel. As all travel is done at sub-light speeds, with ftl not possible, the events of travelling between systems is done in tens and hundreds of years of subjective time. Once you get the hang of this it's easy enough to focus on the story without thinking of anything outside of it, unless it's mentioned within the narrative.

The story flows along quite well and is well written, probably one of Reynolds' best to date. Parts of the story feel like self contained short stories, particularly the early sections, although everything in the book has a reason for being there. I was impressed with the scope of the story and the timeframes involved, although I didn't enjoy the novel as much as I was hoping for. I love Reynolds' short stories and have enjoyed a couple of his novels more than this one and really hoped it would deliver more than it did.

I can't really fault the novel, it's just my tastes that meant I enjoyed it less than I hoped. There was no real feeling of having to read on, no urgency at all. Perhaps that is the result of having the narrative and background over hundreds, thousands and millions of years. A slow burner more than a page turner.

I have read every Alastair Reyonlds book. He captured me with the original Revelation Space, and I have been hoping (for his sake as much as mine!) that he comes around with another winner on that level. While House of Suns is a much better book than his last few, is it also quite different from his usual style.

First the good...we have a far-reaching, mind-bending story that spans millions of years and crosses more than one galaxy. It is a definite page turner and a great mystery. The post-human characterizations are very well done and combine to give you that sense of ultimate time. The interweaved story of Palatial is an interesting twist, very un-Reynolds like, but holds your interest to the (near) end. The ending is actually quite good although stops VERY abruptly, as in you can't believe the last sentence is really the last sentence. Perhaps he is leaving us hanging for a sequel?

Now the bad...it is definitely missing some of the thrilling noir that he is known for. It is actually quite an optimistic novel, with relatively benign characters, not like what I expect from Reynolds. The love story, frankly, was not all that convincing and it is supposed to be a huge part of the novel, so really does not satisfy on that level. Also, the interweaved story of Palatial is ultimately pointless. I really expected some kind of epiphany after reading all that. I am still wondering why it takes such an important role in the book. I mean there are tidbits that I thought I was going to connect, but ultimately it made no sense to the bigger picture (if it made sense to others, please comment and tell me why you think so!). I also thought it was very strange how he alternated between a different point of view each chapter. It was very distracting. Finally, this book is a lot more fantasy than pure hard science fiction. I just wish it was more "believeable". I guess the fact that it takes place millions of years in the future allows him to bypass that aspect (with the one big exception being his faster-than-light limitation).

Still, I give it 4 stars. A worthy read. I would not spend the money to buy a hardcover, though. Buy it in paperback or rent it from the library.

Alastair Reynolds has been both one of my favorite, and most hated authors. I tend to enjoy his one-shots more than his series, maybe because he doesn't have time to write himself into a corner. So too with House of Suns, a book I neglected reading for over a year because I was so put off by Absolution Gap's meandering nonsense.

Gladly, House of Suns returns to what I love about Reynolds' writing. It's told from one of three perspectives throughout, and while it's a bit jarring between the transitions because it's all written in the first person, it's also an interesting technique. Abigail Gentian's family owns and operates one of the most extensive cloning facilities available, and to follow a pressing sense of responsibility to explore, she clones herself one thousand times, hops on one thousand ships, and sets off. No matter where these ships go, they congregate after every trip around the galaxy to share what they've discovered. And like pretty much every single Novel by Reynolds, there is no superluminal transit; it's all done at sub-light speed, even six *million* years after Abigail's departure.

The reason provided is that the universe strives to preserve causality, as light can transmit information, and traveling faster than that, even through utilizing wormholes, would violate that fundamental law. Because Abigail's offspring are effectively immortal, this doesn't really present a problem, but it's still irritating to imagine a future constrained to such relatively slow transportation. Yet partially because of time dilation and frequent bouts of stasis, the Gentian line has outlived effectively every other human civilization, which garners a certain amount of respect.

And at least this time, that's not enough to save them. They're under attack, and the tale of their bare survival in the aftermath is what this novel is really about. Purslane and Campion, the two other perspectives that convey the story, spend the first third of the book just getting to their reunion, but afterwards, it's up to them to discover the source of the attack, and possibly prevent something even worse. All in all, it's very straight-forward. What's interesting is that even though I complained incessantly about how pointless Consider Phlebas was, the sense of discovery here disarms a very similar problem.

Presented on a canvas that covers literally millions of years, where one chapter alone advances the clock by sixty-two thousand years, I still didn't get a sense of how tiny this event was. It was significant because all life in the galaxy was theoretically at risk, but insignificant thanks to the time-scale and the lack of lasting impact by all the transient blooms of human civilization. This tells me Iain M. Banks does *something* in his novels that Alastair Reynolds does not, and while I can't quite put my finger on it, the disparity is quite stark.

Perhaps it's because a narrative actually exists here. The way Hesperus was indispensable and yet incapacitated throughout, was a unique touch. The back-story for Valmik, a man who transformed his merely human existence into something much greater over his six-million years of tweaks. The only thing that really frustrated me was that Reynolds expects us to believe such a being can barely overcome a single Machine Person. It's also transparent that while Reynolds writes hard sci-fi, he simultaneously disregards technology, treating it as a mere afterthought.

An example of this is the final approach of the Silver Wings, Purslane's ship. Whether through accumulation of vast technologies or sheer momentum, it callously swats away attempts to stop its advance, obliterating entire fleets. The Gentian line is apparently only susceptible to nebulously foreboding Homunculus weapons---another creation he never justifies. Reynolds is all about mass, energy, speed, time dilation, and basically anything involving known physics, and tends to gloss over his own magical devices. It's somewhat disappointing, but understandable considering his chosen genre.

In any case, I consider this novel a vindication of my faith in his work. It's not much, but I like this kind of quiet, *feasible* storytelling on occasion.

My decadal Reynolds novel - I've read nearly everything he's written so you could easily say I'm a fan having read all short of Pushing Ice and Terminal World. House of Suns is written in a similar style to his Revelation Space series. Even the book's format and cover are reminiscent of that great series. One can almost begin to draw parallels between the two plots.

With standard modern British pessimistic visions of the future, Reynolds sets this novel in the Milky Way galaxy where humans are the sole inhabitants, which reflects that idea that unique life forms are exceedingly rare and intelligent life forms only crop up possibly once ever billion years, give or take. It's not a line of thought that is easy to subscribe to, it almost makes humans look either like freaks or miracles.

The humans in House of Suns who widely inhabit the Milky Way galaxy are often wildly unique and far-flung. The only thing to bind these sects of humanity together is the Lines of information traders who hoard and exchange information to various levels of civilizations. Maintaining a stasis or cryonic slumber during the numerous stellar bound sojourns, the solitary member of each starship preserves their youth through relativistic time dilation. Got that?

It's an epic novel which awes the reader in the first hundred pages. It's absolutely fantastic but the steam Reynolds produces cannot continue as the plot must eventually gain its own momentum and sap power from the great sense of wonder. When the plot was once a space bound trading fleet experiencing great diversity, eventually the same plot takes a terrestrial base and slows the wonder train down a few notches. Even though the backdrop takes a downshift quite abruptly, Reynolds shows his talent by sustaining a decent plot design and continues a positive build-up of suspense and mystery revolving around the Gentian's distress signal, the Absence in Andromeda and the special-case, non-human Machine People.

There is a perpetual peculiarity among some of the characters which rubs me the wrong way. When the plot takes a terra firma setting, the terrestrial Protectors retain a snippy attitude towards the ill-stuck Gentian Line. Also, one of main protagonists, Purslane, has a never ending line of questions at the most inappropriate moments, which just seems to kill time during passages and allows the greater evil to take a firmer grip upon their own conniving schemes. At some times the characters reveal themselves to be uni-faceted when all you want to do is go back to lose yourself in the wonder.

While reading to the one-hundredth page, two-hundredth page and beyond, the conclusion to the novel is as nebulous as the cosmos itself. I found this uncertainty comforting as most pulp novels have an ending which comes as no surprise to the intelligent, focused reader. However, when the finale came about, I felt a profound lackluster sense of effort on Reynolds' part. He brought it fantastically so far in 470 pages or so but left me hanging with the complaint, "Really? That's it? Icosahedrons, and tetrahedrons... is that the best you can do Reynolds?"

So many fantastic facets are etched into this novel that it cold have easier have stretched itself into another trilogy like Revelation Space. Reynolds gave us a condensed version which perhaps should have been expanded to encompass its true brilliance of information trade, human diversification and the lingering mystery in Andromeda. Withholding the eccentric penning of the novel Century Rain (3/5), I must say that Alastair Reynolds (like Iain Banks) can do no wrong.

There aren't too many authors that do epic science fiction well and Alastair Reynolds is certainly one of them. You can't get much more epic than this. Six million years in the future and spanning the whole galaxy. Quite a departure from the "Revelation Space" universe.

There is no warp drive in this universe though. You only stay youthful by means of relativistic time dilation and a type of stasis that slows the passage of time. There is still plenty of awe inspiring technology however.

The main characters are the "shatterlings" who started out as clones of various family lines at the start of the star faring age. We are mainly concerned with the "Gentian" Line whose originator was Abigail Gentian whose own story is told in a series of interludes. Each line started with 1000 clones and their mission has been to circle the galaxy doing various good works and trading with the sometimes highly modified human civilizations that have grown up along the way. After every galactic circuit the shatterlings of each line meet to share their experiences.

Campion and Purslane are two of the Gentian line who have become romantically involved which is not the done thing with shatterlings. At the start of the story they are on their way to the latest reunion where they expect to be censured for violating line protocol. They have also picked up a mysterious robot passenger called Hesperus. A distress call is received: most of the Gentian line has been wiped out by an attack on the reunion. The survivors, together with Campion and Purslane regroup on another planet where they try to understand what has happened. The resolution reveals some unpleasant truths that have previously been suppressed from everyone's collective memory.

Overall this is a fine far future science fiction story but it falls just short of five stars in my opinion. One issue was the ending which seemed slightly flat to me. Reynold's recent book "The Prefect" was better in my opinion but there is no doubt that Mr Reynolds is a fine talent in this world where hard science fiction seems to be becoming increasingly scarce.