15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Reynolds for the Booker, why not?
I have just finished House of Suns and I think that it may be one of the finest pieces of literature I have ever read.
It is quite simply a beautiful novel. It's sci-fi context is irrelevant to its beauty and I almost wish that he had written the novel about contemporary shatterlings travelling the world and gaining experiences. Maybe if the setting had been...
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
A slow burning, millenia spanning novel
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.
I have just finished House of Suns and I think that it may be one of the finest pieces of literature I have ever read.
It is quite simply a beautiful novel. It's sci-fi context is irrelevant to its beauty and I almost wish that he had written the novel about contemporary shatterlings travelling the world and gaining experiences. Maybe if the setting had been New York and not Neume then this book would be sitting in the sci-fi best sellers and the generic fiction top ten lists.
This book is a massive shift from the revelation space books. Don't get me wrong, I have read them all, but House of Suns is the sum of all of Mr Reynolds previous writing. It is funny, witty and breathtaking but and this is the killer, it is extraordinarly well written.
As I read it the most obvious comparable author was Haruki Murakami. The way Mr Reynolds takes modern themes such as loss and alienation and mixes them with humour and wonder is sublime.
This is not just good sci-fi this is wonderful story telling.
How do you nominate a book for the Man Booker?
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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.
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Just want to write a short review for those who have become fans of Reynold's sublime Space Operas----This is a new direction from most of his novels. Judging by the other reviews this change in tack (it's not realy THAT spectacular a change) is not to the taste of some-but very much to the tase of others. I add my voice to those who think "House of Suns" it is one of his best. The plotting is magnificently inventive (no change there!)Personally I found it almost impossible to put down and I like that in a book!The protagonists are fascinating and the writing at times surpasses that of his earlier work. If you want to read the cream of contemporary Sci-Fi--this is for you.
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I'd sneaked a look at some reviews as I was reading this, but being mindful of spoilers. I did find it a little slow to begin with but looking back it didn't spoil the book even slightly.
I finished reading it today and hand-on-heart this is one of the best books I've ever read, if not THE best! The story is immense, in more than one sense of the word. Set over massive distances and time, I loved getting my head around the scale of the book.
After half way through I had the feeling it was building into a crescendo and I wasn't disappointed. I actually laughed out loud at the very last pages not because they were funny but because it was a brilliant ending to the book.
If you're a fan of Reynolds or sci-fi in general - or even if you love a good story - you HAVE to buy this, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Easily Alastair's best work yet, highly imaginive and completely plausible if you let your mind wander.
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This is Reynolds' eighth novel: five previous ones have been placed in the Revelation Space setting, along with two collections of shorter stories, while Century Rain and Pushing Ice have both been stand-alone. His themes and ideas are now reasonably visible: he does chases, pushing the speed of light and the limits of physics, and crimes so bizarre and horrible that they have no names. He knows this, and in House of Suns, he has re-examined and remade himself as a writer.
There are betrayals within betrayals, crimes dating back millennia, people remade into things that seem barely human, and relativistic chases half-way across the galaxy. Familiar tropes, but he has a new maturity and sureness as a writer; he seems to have looked into the heart of what makes him write and understood it anew. He has visibly learned from Iain Banks in some of these things, and he has passed beyond the Banks of today to the stature of the Banks of the nineties. If you need me to spell that out, he has moved from being a good and significant SF writer, to one of the very best in the world.
It is not clear what he will do next. He has, in many ways, made a coda to his past themes in House of Suns. In particular, the great chase of this book lays to rest the problem of the story of Run Seven. That's one of the background stories of Revelation Space, of which there is no satisfactory rendition; the title story of the collection Galactic North doesn't do justice to the sheer romance of the underlying idea. With a different kind of romance - his first real story of love - he has dealt with that unfinished business.
He has completed his journeyman work. Prepare for his maturity. There should be fireworks.
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The plot summary has been adequately covered in many other reviews, here let me just express my reaction. This is classic SF in the correct use of the adjective - lots of big ideas combined with poor characterisation. Reynolds has certain tropes which recur in his novels: spacecraft chases, the physical melding together of beings and starships, an astrophysical canvas vast in space (intergalactic), time (millions of years) and spacetime architecture (wormholes, stardams, temporal stasis fields).
It is a major defect that all his characters have the same personality to a first approximation: detached, cerebral, droll. The reader doesn't empathise in the alleged emotional involvement of the two main characters, and the murderous intentions expressed towards the 'traitor' also fail to convince.
If I were being really cruel, I guess I would say this is a pretty good novel for an astrophysicist. But as a piece of ideas-and-plot-driven SF it's worth its price and will keep fans reading (but only fans).
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This was my first time reading a book by Alastair Reynolds. I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to reading more by him. Though I felt let down by the ending, it felt rushed and slightly lacking in comparison to the remainder of the book.
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Earlier comments have covered the plot details so I'll concentrate on the severe problems with this book. I'd left it on the shelf for nearly a year having been busy with other things. Perhaps I knew subconsciously what I was in for. I have rated Alastair Reynolds very highly indeed. The Revelation Space series is up there with the best e.g. the first 'Dune' (don't mention the others), 'Downbelow Station' and the Chanur series from Cherryh, Neal Stephenson, Iain M Banks and, if we include Fantasy which this very much is, Tolkein. Reynolds can do hard science, fascinating characters and societies - but not this time. The hard science/magic is there but the writing is wooden and the characters indistinguishable. Most of the chapters are written, turn and turn about, by the two shatterlings Campion and Purslane. I couldn't tell by style or attitude which one had written which chapter and soon ceased to care. I was bored and found myself skipping sentences during the interminable time on the planet Neume. The wooden, lengthy style reminded me of the pulp SF stories of the 30's e.g. 'When worlds collide' but without the drive and zest. There is for example no way John W Campbell would have allowed Purslane's boring 3 page hesitation fugue on whether to eject the two robots into space. So different is this from Chasm City et al that I really wonder if Reynolds wrote it. Or has he changed his editor or his life style? Please Alastair you can do better than this.
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I guess a review generally emcompasses the synopsis of a book; a break down of characters and events, to show a window into the heart of it. However this i believe could never do this book justice for it is quite simply, sublime. Reynolds seems, if possible to have matured in a way that causes his already remarkable achievements within SF to pale by comparison (and that is no mean feat). It's a love story, a galactic super nova, a vision of the future rarely seen in SF today. I lift my glass to you Mr Reynolds.
Paul
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This excellent novel has a short story prequel, unfortunately absent from this volume: 'The Thousandth Night'. It is available in Gardner Dozois One Million A.D. anthology. As for House of Suns, in my humble opinion, this is Reynolds' best novel to date. Future immortal clones of a person explore the Milky Way and meet to reconvene every 200,000 years. Reynolds has this unique ability to render his science as captivating as the story itself. Read Thousandth Night first!
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