House of Suns

[sawyl]

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds' third novel set outside Revelation Space, has two main narrative strands set six million years apart. The first thread, which follows the childhood of a girl called Abigail, unfolds as a serious of preludes to each part of the main narrative, with each presaging a point being made in the main plot. The primary strand, follows the Gentian shatterlings — modified clones of Abigail — as they move through the galaxy gathering information and doing good deeds. The narration of the story alternates between Campion and Purslane, a pair of Gentians who have forsaken their Line's rules against fraternisation and chosen to travel together.

The first few chapters do the bulk of the world building, leading to a couple of chapters in which it seems as though every other word is Auspiciously Captialised. It does a reasonable job of describing the differences between the Lines, groups of cloned post-humans who exist outside history, the planet bound societies, and, following the introduction of the robot Hesperus, the Machine People. It also sets up two of the significant mysteries of the book: the Absence, a blank space where Andromeda used to be; and the Vigilance, a Dyson cloud database staffed by vast, slow, immortal librarians. Of all the sections of the book, the opening seems to be the weakest, partly because of the burden of setup, but there also seem to be a number of loose ends that don't really resolve terribly satisfactorily — something that shows when contrasted with subsequent parts where things tie themselves up rather neatly.

With things established, the Gentian shatterlings rush to make a rendezvous with the rest of House of Flowers, only receive a distress message telling them that their fellow shatterlings have been ambushed and that they should avoid their destination at all costs. Naturally, they ignore this advice and plunge into the system, running through a gauntlet of forbidden weapons to rescue a handful of survivors and their prisoners. With Hesperus badly damaged in the combat, they eventually flee to a fallback world where they encounter a small group of fellow survivors. Here, they undercover hints that their attackers were members of the House of Suns, a group they believe to be hidden Line, and find signs at least some members of their own House must have been complicit in the attack.

The second and subsequent sections of the book are much stronger than the opening. The paranoid, febrile atmosphere of the survivors comes out very strongly, as does the initial politicking and jockeying for position, something that deeply offends Campion even though he himself has no real desire for leadership. Some parts, where the Gentians argue about whether, and later how, they should torture their prisoners can only be read as comments on the current political situation:

"We suffered an appalling attack," I said. "It was brutal and came without warning. We're right to seek justice, right to go after those who wronged us. But that doesn't mean we get to throw away every moral principle we've ever abided by."

"Times are different now," Mezereon said. "They made it this way, not us."

Is necessary to point out that Mezereon is deeply poisonous?

Although I'm not sure that House of Suns is Reynolds at his absolute best — I wonder if the initial section might, perhaps, have been written a while ago and resurrected to provide a scene setter for the rest of the novel? — that doesn't mean it's not extremely readable. The later sections are particularly fine and the parallel thread of Abigail's story dovetails very elegantly with main plot, revealing just enough to add an extra dimension to the details of Campion's and Purslane's account of events. I also enjoyed the plays on some of the names, such as Mezereon being torture crazed, and the clever uses of the various cultural associations of the name Hesperus.