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

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Six million years in the future, the entire galaxy is a Used Future. Tens of thousands of human civilizations have risen and fallen. The galaxy's been united under a single banner too many times to count. In the face of deep time, each galactic federation always falls. No one group endures. Alien Sky: The world that the novel starts on has a special atmospheric bubble which, at night, amplifies faint stars and nebulae, creating a very colorful night sky. Winchester Mystery House, being constantly rebuilt at the behest of her now incurably insane mother. This brand of science fiction tends to be heavier on science, ideas, and the gears of the plot than it is on storytelling, psychological depth, or thematic richness, and, though there are a few exceptions (Dune, Hyperion, and A Fire Upon the Deep come to mind), House of Suns isn’t one of them. It’s a shame that Reynolds didn’t go deeper with his premise and explore his protagonists’ inner lives with all those millions of years passing around them. Also, some developments seemed a little unbelievable, owing to the common sci-fi problem of “if they’re advanced enough to do X, can’t they do Y?” There’s a lot of hand-waving where technology is concerned. (WTF is a homunculus weapon? Who knows.) Alastair Reynolds on Trying to Encompass the Entire History of Science Fiction in One Novel". 4 November 2022.

That massacre turns out to be tied to a crime that the "shatterlings" are complicit in, but have forgotten, millions of years ago. And that historical atrocity, which is both ancient and personal, turns out to be connected to a whole host of other secrets about the nature of the galaxy and our place in the universe. Meanwhile, we learn about another crime, which the clones' progenitor, Abigail Gentian, committed in her youth, inside a virtual world called Palatial. In a universe where we're reminded, over and over, that "nascent" societies rise up out of nothing, only to die off again in a scant half-million years, how much do we owe to the ghosts of the intelligences we've wronged? Sub-Lightspeed Setting: Countless millennia in the future clone-lines traveling the galaxy at near-lightspeed provide some continuity of civilization for the countless human and posthuman colonies across space. fact that this does not seem to occur to Reynolds is a clue to the sense of inhumanity generated by so much of his largePrecursors: Priors. Arose billions of years ago, scattered impossibly advanced technology across the galaxy, and then vanished: a perfectly textbook example. that in an information-rich universe this is a story about what is not known. Hesperus has had his memory of his That's No Moon: The protagonists stop at a ringed gas giant because they heard about a spaceship salesman who lives there. They enter the atmosphere and find that he only has a few ships to sell. After some coercion, he shows them his entire collection of ships, which were hidden inside and disguised as part of the gas giant's ring system. Glacial" – Originally published in Spectrum SF #5 (March 2001); reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002, ISBN 0-312-28879-4), Gardner Dozois, ed.; and in Year's Best SF 7 (2002, ISBN 0-06-106143-3), David G. Hartwell& Kathryn Cramer, eds. The Six Directions of Space", ISBN 978-1596061842 – Originally published in Galactic Empires (September 2007 [36]), Gardner Dozois, ed.

that makes us go "Wow!." It's all about scale, the biggest devices, the biggest bangs, the biggest distances. And no-one does The Water Thief" – originally published in Arc 1.1 / The Future Aways Wins (February 2012), Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Simon Ings, eds. I was born in Wales, but raised in Cornwall, and then spent time in the north of England and Scotland. I moved to the Netherlands to continue my science career and stayed there for a very long time, before eventually returning to I'm Al, I used to be a space scientist, and now I'm a writer, although for a time the two careers ran in parallel. I started off publishing short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone in the early 90s, then eventually branched into novels. I write about a novel a year and try to write a few short stories as well. Some of my books and stories are set in a consistent future named after Revelation Space, the first novel, but I've done a lot of other things as well and I like to keep things fresh between books.Big Dumb Object: The Vigilance, a massive Dyson swarm which archives all human knowledge. May qualify as a Big Smart Object. House of Suns ReadMe (should have been included in the audiobook): This entire book is written First Person from three different POV's, Abigail Gentian in the 31st century before the shattering and Purslane and Campion, two of Abigail's 1000 clones (shatterlings), told 6 million years after the shattering. The book is presented in eight parts with an introduction to each part done from Abigail's time and POV and subsequent chapters within each part alternate between Purslane's and Campion's POV. Signal to Noise" – Originally published in Zima Blue and Other Stories, (2006); reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2006, ISBN 978-0-312-36335-2), Gardner Dozois, ed.