Alastair Reynolds – House of Suns
20 09 2009How far into the future have you thought or dreamt about? A decade? Fifty years? One hundred years? A thousand years? I think that’s about my limit of how far out I’ve thought about the future – wondering what the world might look like in 2999 in 1999, I had a heady feeling that we would all be either immortal – or there wouldn’t be an earth left. So, when Alastair Reynolds begins House of Suns with a deliberately ambiguous timeframe, I was sure that the story wasn’t set more than a thousand years or so in the future. And it’s true – parts of the story are in fact set in the beginning of the fourth millennium CE, taking place on a vast torus of asteroids and bodies circling the sun at a distance of about a half a light hour. But the majority of the story takes place 32 circuits in the future. And how long, you ask now, is a circuit? Well, let’s put it to you this way.
Sometime about a thousand years in to the future, humanity splits into two major factions: those that choose to remain gravity well-bound, choosing to establish civilizations on planets and planetary systems, and those who choose not to re-enter the gravity well – and spend years touring the galaxies in guilds known as lines – the Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers, is one such line from which we are introduced to two characters: Campion and Purslane, the characters around which the story of House of Suns revolves. The business of all the Lines, organized into cartel known as the Commonality, is to care for the planet-bound civilizations as they rise and fall, and the business of the Gentian Line, in particular, is to ensure that stars close to inhabited systems do not destroy these worlds when the stars explode, or supernova. The galaxy is mostly empty – organic life has all evolved from humans, which have adapted themselves in infinite ways to suit their local planets, or systems, or ships, and machines are all descended from the development of current-day human computers and artificial intellect. There is, however, one rather weird thing: the Andromeda Galaxy, our closest neighbouring galaxy, is missing. For all practical purposes, the galaxy is there – but it can’t be seen from anywhere inside the Milky Way. Since the discovery of this Absence, a project called the Vigilance has been organized to watch over the Absence and try to understand why the Andromeda is missing, and by whom or what agency, the galaxy disappeared. Reynolds excels at Lovecraftian horror. With Revelation Space, there’s the frightening disappearing of worlds. With House of Suns, it’s the frightening disappearance of an entire galaxy. Civilizations rise and fall, lives are begun and ended, as the Vigilance continues to watch what has happened with Andromeda and try to make sense of it. It’s fascinating, and utterly frightening.
So, circuits. Well, Lines are households composed of about a thousand individuals each; each individual is called a shatterling. You’ll find out why they’re called that pretty soon into the book, and it makes excellent sense. Each Lines’ shatterlings takes their ship, usually alone, and proceeds to do charitable work for the Line, acting in accordance with Commonality’s belief that it is their duty to help planet-bound civilizations. The nigh immortal shatterling takes a round of the galaxy, helping where possible – called a circuit – and then returning every so many years for a reunion of the Line – an event called the Thousand Nights. On average, a circuit is about 200,000 years long, and a reunion lasts just three. And the story, to save you the math, is thus taking place about 6.4 million years into the future, at the event of one of the reunions. Or at least, that’s where it starts – it goes on from there.
Reading this book, I had the feeling I occasionally have when I’ve very very sick – this feeling that I’m falling head first off a cliff – but for entirely different reasons. For one thing, One Million CE is a mind-boggling distance away into the future. For another, 6.4 Million CE is the equivalent of the entirety of human evolution. I’ve always known the universe is a big place, and traveling around the universe takes time, but it doesn’t strike me how mind bogglingly large the universe is, until I read stories like this where the distance and time scales boggle my mind. The only other book I’ve read where I’ve had this feeling is Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama Revealed, as various members of the des Jardins-Wakefield family are being split up and told to say their goodbyes as the distances between them are about to grow immense. While Reynolds does a fantastic job tying up the loose ends of this novel in a way that he doesn’t in Revelation Space, I almost enjoyed some of the mysteries in that series more because they went unexplained. It also left a lot of room to grow the universe, while this novel is pretty much done and going to stand alone: he had a story to tell and he’s told it, though you may not realize he’s done when you read the last sentence.
I’m not going to tell you much of the plot of the story, because it really is that good. It will tie up nicely at the end, if you’re looking for that, with almost all of the explanations forthcoming. Those mysteries without explanations are minor at best, so if you do not like loose ends in your novels, this is for you, my friend. You do get dumped into the novel in the middle of all the action, so you might be frustrated until you understand how all the parts are connected and how the terms all match up, but it’s not like a Neal Stephenson novel where every third word is new and people like it for that obtuseness. All I can say is, don’t be surprised if after reading it, you’re not in the mood for some space travel, immediately.
Categories : books, review
