Adventure

Review: House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

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.

Dan

View Comments

Share
Published by
Dan

Recent Posts

Review: <em>Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia</em> by Jason Pargin

Author Jason Pargin has made a career out of hilarious and fast-moving books with surprisingly…

1 year ago

Review: <em>The Tusks of Extinction</em> by Ray Nayler

The Tusks of Extinction is a short novellette/novelito (smaller than a novella) where mammoths have…

1 year ago

The Best Silkpunk Books

There are a couple of science fiction books in this list, but right now, most…

1 year ago

Review: <em>Venomous Lumpsucker</em> by Ned Beauman

In the near-future world of Venomous Lumpsucker, everything has continued to get worse, to the…

1 year ago

The Best Dark Science Fiction Books

Calling a book "dark" can mean many things, and the books on this list mean…

1 year ago

The Best Science Fiction Books with Gas Giants

Gas giants are wonderfully weird, mysterious, and incredibly dangerous. It's surprising there aren't more gas…

1 year ago