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

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Search This Blog