{"id":394,"date":"2012-02-08T22:26:46","date_gmt":"2012-02-08T14:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/?p=394"},"modified":"2012-02-08T22:26:46","modified_gmt":"2012-02-08T14:26:46","slug":"books-house-of-suns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/?p=394","title":{"rendered":"Books – House of Suns"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m close to catching up with Alastair Reynolds’ novels now. As noted in my post on The Prefect<\/a> I’d missed The House of Suns when it came out so ordered it, along with Blue Remembered Earth. I’ve had a cold the last week so didn’t get around to posting about Terminal World yet so I thought I’d do them in order of publication instead of order of reading. There’s a comment I want to make on Terminal World about House of Suns, anyway, so it makes more sense in that order. Warning spoilers ahead.
\n
\nHouse of Suns is quite typical Reynolds. Featuring Deep Time, near-lightspeed travel, cryo-stasis (and other forms of forward time travel). Unlike most of his other work, though, he drops FTL into this one at the end with a cute attempt to get around the causality-violating paradox of FTL.
\nIt actually rather reminds me of Charlie Stross’ Saturn’s Children in its main conceit of a line (in this case biologicals, in Stross’ case mechanicals) of near-identical siblings who share memories and a source. There’s a lot of differences, but a striking similarity nonetheless. They’re both from 2008 so neither is copying the concept from the other.
\nThis is a fun one-off with lots of ideas thrown into the mix just to keep things interesting.
\nThere’s a thread running from near-future entwined with the main thread in deep Time (6m years hence). The near-future bit is a bit weak. Sure, there’s a nice Gene Wolfe-style reflective bit of levels intertwining in multiple ways, but the fantasy-setting, which is somewhat intended to be weak and cliched, is too well done as that and so drags a little bit. The main Deep Time thread twists and turns like a dancer in a 50s dance marathon. Who’s a bad guy, who’s a good guy, what’s the right thing to do and where’s the right place to do it. Despite the slight weakness in the near future stuff, I think this is my favourite of his books so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m close to catching up with Alastair Reynolds’ novels now. As noted in my post on The Prefect I’d missed The House of Suns when it came out so ordered it, along with Blue Remembered Earth. I’ve had a cold the last week so didn’t get around to posting about Terminal World yet so I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,36,17,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sf-books","category-books","category-sf","category-books-sf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}