Author Alastair Reynolds isn’t afraid of big, strange ideas, and he puts on a parade of them in House of Suns.

Six million years ago, a woman named Abigail Gentian fractured her consciousness into a thousand different clones, called shatterlings. Since then, the shatterlings have observed the rise and fall of many human civilizations. Nearly immortal, they meet every two hundred thousand years to share memories.

Except now, someone is wiping out all of the Gentian shatterlings. It’s up to Campion and Purslane—two shatterlings—to figure out who or what is trying to kill them.

House of Suns is imaginative, fun, and well-paced, but pretty thin on character development. The book’s more about far-future coolness than fully-developed characters.

Recommendation: Check it out at the library. It’s absolutely a fun read, but not quite worthy of permanent shelf space.