Monday 25 April 2011

House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds

The human race has learned how to slow down subjective time and travel close to the speed of light. Various 'lines' of clones travel the galaxy and meet to regularly pool their experiences. One line is almost wiped out by a secret line that is trying to suppress the memory of a past genocide of a fledgling machine intelligence lest the current race of machine intelligence find out and declare war.

The constant switching of the first person narrative between two characters witnessing the same events was irritating. The back story of the origins of Gentian line and the events in Palatial were a bit dull and disconnected but interesting in places such as the mass repetition of magic spells.

Hesperus and the Machine People were fascinating as were The Spirit of the Air and the Vigilance. The story stalls a little on Neume but otherwise the pacing and suspense are first rate. The ending was a bit of a squib.

8.6
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