House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds ★★★★
Nov. 6th, 2009 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

In the early fourth millennium, humanity largely lives within the light-hour surrounding our own Sun, and a few wealthy tycoons take up galactic tourism: they clone themselves a thousand times (often with genetic variations, including gender), decanting their personality into each clone, and set out in a thousand ships to travel the galaxy at near-lightspeed, with plans to meet up later. As civilizations rise and fall across the galaxy, these “shatterlings” (with the assistance of technologies for suspended animation, life extension, and time dilation) see six million years pass, trading information and expertise to the worlds they visit.
The book has two parallel stories: a shorter one following the youth of Abigail Gentian, who grows up to spawn the thousand shatterlings called Gentian Line (or the House of Flowers, since all of them are named after flowers), and a larger one following the intertwined lives of two of her shatterlings, Campion and Purslane, who have broken the rules of their Line, fallen in love, and taken up traveling together. They arrive late at a scheduled reunion of the Line, fearing censure by their fellows, and discover that someone has attempted to wipe out the entire clan. Their challenge is to figure out who did it, and why— and to survive.
Reynolds does a good job of keeping the suspense high even as the action stretches over the decades and centuries of interstellar travel. The tale includes some reflections on recent events, including the fear of the Other and the erosion of morality in times of stress. The feel is very much in the New Space Opera style of his other works, but is not as dark as the tales in his Revelation Space universe.