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

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Human Subspecies: Humanity fractured into a million daughter species, some of which were scarcely recognisable to each other. That said the story is not hard to follow providing you give it time to unfold and settle you in its very far future settings. Mile-Long Ship: Common enough that every member of Gentian Line (and likely most, if not all shatterlings in general) seems to own at least one. They individually roam the galaxy, traveling from star to star near the speed of light, skipping over the ages via time dilation. Keeping the story in a pacey "first-person" format, he alternates the viewpoint between the two main characters, as well as filling in some introductory background from the perspective of a third person during the preamble to each f the book's parts.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There was a vicious attack on the reunion world; an ambush in which the majority of the Gentian Line was wiped out.Insistent Terminology: "Whisking" for teleportation, and "levator" for any piece of machinery that works against gravity. Cadence and Cascade hack into the ship's computer, taking it over, and take off from Neume with Hesperus and Purslane still aboard. This is my second Alastair Reynolds book, the first being Revelation Space which is his debut novel published 8 years before House of Suns. It was indeed – it uses the setting and some characters from the novella Thousandth Night (which I haven’t read).

And faced with concepts and events that span long stretches of millennia, the human mind tends to withdraw, to recoil, at the mere thought of too much time. However, the possibilities are manifold, but there seems to be not much difference between being brought up by mad, flesh parents or wacky artificial teachers. CLARKE AWARD; REVELATION SPACE, ABSOLUTION GAP, DIAMOND DOGS and CENTURY RAIN were shortlisted for the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD and CHASM CITY won the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD. The main POV characters are Campion and Purslane Gentian, male and female clones of Abigail Gentian.Large-scale human civilizations almost invariably seem to collapse and disappear within a few millennia (a phenomenon referred to as "turnover"), the limits of sub-lightspeed travel making it too difficult to hold interstellar empires together. Unwitting Instigator of Doom: It turns out that Campion is the one starting the chain of events that end up with the near-destruction of the Gentian Line due to the fact that on the circuit prior, he got some information out of Vigilance that, unknowing to him and most others, could be used to infer the existence of the First Machines. I’ve read and enjoyed quite a few of their Alastair Reynolds, but not this one, which they took to university, and which I’ve just borrowed.