House of Suns

Did You Know?

• The novel is set in the same fictional setting as Reynolds' novella 'Thousandth Night'.
• Reynolds has stated that the longer work does not attempt slavish consistency with 'Thousandth Night'.
• A number of characters killed in the novella make an appearance in the novel.

Setting

The novel is set approximately six million years in the future, with humanity spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy, which appears devoid of any other organic sentient life. Numerous human and posthuman civilizations of varying development exist, alongside a civilization of sentient robots called the Machine People. Technologies include anti-gravity, inertia damping, force fields, stellar engineering, and stasis fields. The Andromeda Galaxy has mysteriously disappeared, an event referred to as the Absence. Large-scale human civilizations tend to collapse within millennia due to the limits of sub-lightspeed travel, a phenomenon called turnover. The most powerful entities are the Lines, familial organizations of cloned shatterlings who travel through space, holding reunions after circuits of the galaxy lasting about 200,000 years. The Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers, consists of Abigail Gentian and her 999 clones, all named after flowering plants.

Synopsis

The novel is divided into eight parts, each opening with a flashback to Abigail Gentian's early life six million years earlier. Subsequent chapters alternate between the first-person perspectives of two shatterlings, Campion and Purslane, who are in a relationship frowned upon by the Line. The main story begins as they are fifty years late to the 32nd Gentian reunion. They hope Hesperus's rescue will excuse their tardiness. Traveling to the reunion world, they receive an emergency signal that the reunion was attacked with Homunculus weapons, ancient spacetime-bending devices ordered destroyed by another Line. Several Gentian survivors and four prisoners are rescued; Hesperus is critically wounded. They go to Neume, the backup reunion world, and meet about forty other Gentians and two Machine People guests, Cadence and Cascade. Another Gentian is murdered, leading to suspicion of a traitor. Purslane is forced to give her ship to Cadence and Cascade as punishment for Campion. Hesperus is taken to Spirit of the Air, an ancient Neumean posthuman machine-intelligence, for repairs; he is returned non-functional but has become an amalgamation with Spirit.

Reception

Lisa Tuttle of The Times described the novel as a thrilling, mind-boggling adventure with visionary brilliance and a knock-your-socks-off ending. Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club noted Reynolds's skill in conveying the vastness of space and the inky blackness of the void, stating that House of Suns keeps up the tradition of forward thinking while improving on the genre's traditionally flat prose and clumsily drawn women. A reviewer at SF Signal remarked that the book excels in sense of wonder, with Reynolds using believable science to back up grand ideas on a galactic canvas, yielding mind-boggling time scales. George Williams of The Australian observed that the concepts are so far removed from our time that parts border on fantasy, but the author carries off a story on a rarely seen scale. Williams noted weaknesses: a slow start, meandering plot, and underdeveloped leads and their relationship.