House of Suns: Alastair Reynolds (GOLLANCZ S.F.)

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Despite having been around for millions of years, undergoing their own Mechanical Evolution, there's still people who think of them as nothing more than mindless automatons who just ''imitate'' sentience.

The exceptions are the first chapter and seven others, told by Abigail, long, long ago, until her story catches up with the main one. The only constant in the galaxy are the Lines such as Gentian Line: one thousand clones of a woman that lived in the 31st century at the start of humanity's interstellar colonization who live exclusively aboard spaceships that jet around at near-lightspeed, and so due to Time Dilation pass millions of years despite experiencing only thousands. As Campion and the shatterlings are pursuing Purslane's hijacked ship, transmissions from Neume confirm that a shatterling within their midst, Galingale, is the traitor and a secret member of the House of Suns. At SF Signal, one reviewer noted that a "sense of wonder is where this book excels", adding that "Reynolds is playing on a galactic-sized canvas and uses believable science to back up his grand ideas. We could build cities like that… But we haven’t… and now they’ve left their mark on deep time, whereas we’ll be doing well to be remembered a circuit from now.The amount of mind-bending concepts Reynolds managed to pack into this novel while maintaining a coherent story is impressive: Star dams, ring worlds, causality, time dilation, artificial intelligence, solar system relocation, ancient technology, the nature of memory, longevity, cloning, wormholes, civilizational “turnover”, etc. Endangered Species: Though not a "species", per se, this is pretty much what happens to the Gentian Line. This is my second Alastair Reynolds book, the first being Revelation Space which is his debut novel published 8 years before House of Suns.

In the end it turns out that the First Machines have no interest in what they consider to be a vice of biologicals and have moved on thoroughly averting the trope. These aren´t rare too and Reynolds plays his astrophysics profession card more wisely and less hardcore than in the Revelation Space series, making it easier to follow, more focused on the great and heavily interwoven plot, so be focused while reading not to oversee the premises because Reynolds likes to puzzle with tiny pieces and each knows it´s place. They manage to find the remains of a ship with several Gentian members still alive, and rescue them and the four enemy prisoners they had captured. I've read most of Alastair Reynolds's SF novels and enjoyed them all, but "House of Suns" is exceptional, even by his high standards.Humanity's Wake: Due to the sheer number of civilizations that have come before, it seems you can't go anywhere in the galaxy without bumping into some planet that was colonized, terraformed, rose to prominence, became the center of a galactic civilization, then died out, leaving the ruins to be colonized again by whatever evolved in the three million years that has passed. After some coercion, he shows them his entire collection of ships, which were hidden inside and disguised as part of the gas giant's ring system. V. Club wrote that Reynolds is particularly adept at conveying the vastness of space and the "inky blackness of the void", adding that House of Suns "keeps up the tradition of forward thinking while improving on the genre’s traditionally flat prose and clumsily drawn women.

Jeff Noon and Steve Beard combine their powers to tell the story of an otherworldly London and its waterways in Gogmagog. The most impressive thing is the world building, and how the complex science becomes understandable and readable in a way that you don't normally find in these types of books.Early machine intelligences were fascinated by arts and sciences because “The only genuinely innovative act they had ever achieved was to come into existence”.