It’s been very interesting to read Alastair Reynolds’ new slab of space opera, House of Suns, so soon after having read Iain M Banks’ new Culture blockbuster Matter. While House of Suns does not take place in the Revelation Space universe in which the author has set much of his oeuvre, it shares a great deal of its outlook and many of the same preoccupations. Reynolds’ universes are bleak places – civilizations rise and fall with predictable regularity; mankind and its evolutionary offshoots are the only sentient organic life anywhere in the known universe; factions are endemic, and Reynolds always imparts these in particular with a lot of depth, from the Ultras and Conjoiners of Revelation Space to the ‘Lines’ of this new Universe. Banks’ ideas appear even more Utopian in the light of Reynolds’ vision – the Culture offers solutions for age-old problems, providing immortality and true freedom through technology; by contrast Reynolds offers us a darker concept of societal development, though perhaps humanity’s persistence in the face of adversity is optimism of a kind.

House of Suns focuses on two members of the Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers – cloned millions of years ago from the human woman Abigail Gentian, the shatterlings Campion and Purslane tour the galaxy in search of knowledge and new experiences, to share with the rest of the Line at one of their periodic gatherings. These circuits take place over huge swathes of time, made possible by time suspension technologies, very fast ships and cellular regeneration techniques that make the shatterlings immortal if not invulnerable. The Gentian Line also specialise in assisting ‘transient’ civilisations (those destined to develop, expand and go extinct over the course of mere millennia) by building stardams around rogue suns. As such, they have a truly long-term perspective on galactic events, and they can only maintain their mental equilibrium over such long lifespans by selectively archiving parts of their memories.

Campion and Purslane are also lovers, in defiance of Line norms, and we understand from the beginning of the novel that they are nearly inseparable. They are on their way to the reunion of the Gentian Line, a thousand year party where experiences and memories are shared and bonds are rebuilt, when they rescue Hesperus, a member of the sentient mechanical race of Machine People. When disaster strikes the reunion, the censure they expect from their fellow shatterlings for their lateness and their liaison becomes the least of their problems.

At first it appears that the surviving members of the House of Flowers need primarily to concern themselves with their own survival – however when Purslane and Hesperus are kidnapped by two more robots from the Machine People, aboard Purslane’s ship, a chase of truly mammoth scale ensues as the other shatterlings race to keep up, with Campion to the fore, and it turns out that the survival of the whole of humanity may be at stake. Reynolds paces the revelations and ratchets up the tension nicely from the moment the chase kicks off, and there are some breathless stretches of deep-space pursuit in a style that will be familiar to readers of the Revelation Space trilogy.

Intercut with the main story is the tale of Abigail Gentian herself, before she made the decision to clone herself into a thousand pieces and spread herself throughout the galaxy. As her story unfolds, the link between her personality and that of the shatterlings starts to become clearer, and parallels between her experiences and other key events begin to become apparent.

As the nature of the mysterious House of Suns is revealed, Reynolds leaves his readers with plenty to think about – has human nature evolved to keep pace with the numerous advances in technology that enable the shatterlings of the Lines to live for millions of years? Perhaps not, seems to be the answer.

I very much enjoyed House of Suns – especially as it sometimes feels rare to find substantial but self-contained sci-fi novels to get stuck in to (technically this is a continuation of an earlier story, but it’s not necessary to have read it to enjoy House of Suns). The entire story is written from the first-person perspective of the main characters, which highlights the only real flaw – the characterisation is not as strong as it could be. The voices of Campion and Purslane, despite being male and female, are sometimes hard to distinguish, although that could be because they are clones of the same person! Having said that, characterisation has never been Reynolds’ strongest suit, and it does not stop him from achieving what he sets out to deliver – a story that is imaginative, exciting, well-paced and marvellous in the truest sense of the word.

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