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ICON RPG Convention |
 23-25 July 2010
JABULA REC HALL, JHB |
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House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds |
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Written by Joe Vaz
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 House of Suns
By Alastair Reynolds
Published by:
Orion
473p TP
“I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp. I was a girl then, a single individual called Abigail Gentian.”
If you’ve never read an Alastair Reynolds book, you’re in for a helluva ride. Over the past twenty years, Reynolds’s short stories and novels have been systematically blowing readers minds with his specific brand of far-future hard SF adventure. He’s been labelled as a writer of space-opera, but there is a lot more to Reynolds’s fiction than one could ever imagine from reading the dust jacket.Reynolds writes hard SF, yes. He also writes wide-screen space opera. But where he truly excels is not in the painting of enormous landscapes but in the intricate details of very human and highly-believable characters thrown into the most remarkable, vast, mind-melting environments and situations.
Take House of Suns, Reynolds’s eighth novel in as many years - It’s about Campion and Purslane, two shatterlings of the Gentian line, an inter-stellar race of human clones whose particular talent is harnessing and containing the power of suns. Not only are Campion and Purslane running a little late for their reunion, (by a decade or two) but they’ve also picked up a mysterious robot who is suffering from amnesia. The Gentians travel for one full circuit (of the galaxy, roughly 200,000 years) and then meet up for a thousand-night celebration and reunion where they share all that they have experienced and learnt over the previous 200k years. Needless to say, they are immortal. When time is irrelevant, the perception of its passage becomes fleeting. It recedes into the background.
To be honest this is one of the hardest of Reynolds’s books to read, and if you’re new to his writing I would suggest starting off with the excellent SF noir-thriller, Century Rain. What makes House of Suns a struggle at times is the time-scale. Not only is it set six million years into our future, but the characters, being immortal, seem not to connect to any comprehensible measure of time. One has to push through the first hundred pages or so to get used to the time-scale and the alternating multiple-viewpoint first-person narration, and to understand the back-story. Don’t give up though. Once the book gets going, the plot will take you on a twisting, writhing roller-coaster ride (albeit one that takes 60 thousand years), across millions of light years, to distant stars and cultures.
What I particularly enjoy in Reynolds’s writing is his ability to tell you a human story about human emotions, the extremes of which are particularly evident in House of Suns. It is definitely one of the largest-scale portraits of our galaxy, both in scope and time, that Reynolds has attempted to date. Yet, at its heart, it is also one of his simplest stories, about two lovers whose lives are turned upside down by attempted genocide and betrayal. House of Suns is a romance/horror/science fiction/space-opera with an intricate mystery braided into the plot. It is touching, funny and astounding, but I warn you: it is not an easy read.
- Joe Vaz
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 Supported by
The National Arts Council
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