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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

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