House of Suns (SF) - Alastair Reynolds ****

Alastair Reynolds is a reliably enjoyable author of high quality science fiction, and in this 2008 novel he lives up to expectations. Each section of the book starts with an excerpt from the life of Abigail Gentian, then skips forward six million years to a point in time where her thousand clones have travelled vast numbers of light years, in stasis during their long voyages: they have very long lives, but most of the time they are not conscious - so see slower living civilisations come and go.

The clones, known as shatterlings, meet up after taking a circuit that last many tens of thousands of years: the present time chapters alternate between the viewpoints of two of the clones, Campion and Purslane, who have semi-illegally paired up. This is the starting point for classically vast quality space opera happenings, from genocide to repairing a stardam that prevents a supernova from wiping out its surroundings. As things develop, secrets from deep history are uncovered and the whole of humanity is at risk of destruction.

Reynolds does a great job of imagining a collection of far-future technologies, plus various human variants, including some that never stop growing. What he is particularly skilful at is keeping a whole lot of far-future balls in the air, without it ever being difficult to follow what's going on - lesser SF writers can easily leave the reader lost in such circumstances. The threat faced by the main characters is deeply engaging, and the political machinations enable Reynolds to go beyond basic space opera, making the whole something significantly more interesting.

The book was a little long at 500 pages, and I did get a touch bored with the flashbacks to Abigail's time when the action took place in an immersive fantasy VR game. Also, the ending is a little rushed - but these are the only things that prevents this from being a five star book.

Though not Reynolds' best, it certainly is one of his most imaginative titles.

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog