House Of Suns

Author: Alastair Reynolds

What are the Welsh famous for? Prior to House of Suns' rip-roaring success, it was Sean Connery, Catherine Zeta-Jones. And not much else! But in 2007, Welsh science-fiction author Alastair Reynolds announced that he was halfway through writing a new novel set in the "Thousandth Night" universe (a novella he wrote for the One Million A.D. anthology), and buy 2008 House of Suns was born and shortlisted in 2009 for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. 6 million years into the future, humans live all over the Milky Way galaxy and are still the only organic, sentient life form that they are aware of, the only other sentient beings being post humans and the "Machine People", sentient robots, who all live peacefully side by side. The world is unique for the technology - anti gravity, force fields, stellar engineering, inertial dampening and stasis fields. Historically, the world was struck by the "Absence" - the unexplained disappearance of the Andromeda Galaxy. Socially, civilizations are limited by sub-light speed travel which makes interstellar empires too difficult to hold together, and civilizations collapse within millennia, known as "turnover". The novel follows the shatterlings: the Gentian Line, a human who fractured herself into a thousand male and female clones, which she called shatterlings, known as "the Lines". The Lines do not inhabit planets, but instead travel through space, helping young civilizations, collecting knowledge and experiencing the universe. But now, someone is determined to eliminate the Line. Two shatterlings - Campion and Purslane fall in love and it becomes their journey to find out who their enemy is, before the Line is eradicated. This novel will appeal to anyone who loves hard sci-fi, space opera fiction and even a good love story. A reviewer for the Times, Lisa Tuttle, called the novel a "thrilling, mind-boggling adventure", with a "knock-your-socks-off ending".