House of Suns: Alastair Reynolds (GOLLANCZ S.F.)
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House of Suns: Alastair Reynolds (GOLLANCZ S.F.)
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Description
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.
Purslane's ship, Silver Wings of Morning, is so large that its main cargo bay has its own weather system. The Lines do not inhabit planets, but instead travel through space, holding reunions after they have performed a "circuit" of the galaxy; something that takes about 200,000 years. Six million years ago, at the very dawn of the starfaring era, Abigail Gentian fractured herself into a thousand male and female clones: the shatterlings. It is not quite "perfect": in terms of its own self-consistency, the scene-setting that leads up to the finale doesn't quite ring true, there's a bit of conveniency there.right over my head, this is to be expected as I have difficulty figuring out how dental floss works. Alien Sky: The world that the novel starts on has a special atmospheric bubble which, at night, amplifies faint stars and nebulae, creating a very colorful night sky. Unable to get within weapons range, Campion pursues Purslane’s ship for sixty thousand light years, during which time he and Purslane, on their separate ships, are suspended in "abeyance", a form of temporal slowdown or stasis.
There are only a few things that led me to take a star off: at one juncture there is a disconnect in the story line that makes you think you must have missed a chapter which made me go back and then finding it is patched over later - why mess with the timeline?
Late in the story, it turns out the Stardam didn't fail: it was deliberately opened by a group of Machine People trying to find a Prior wormhole leading to the Andromeda Galaxy. Sometimes it’s for nefarious purposes, sometimes for self-preservation, and sometimes to spare others from pain. The general story is about a society/culture that tried to find a way of being and seeking some form of enlightened human experience within that constraint. El final es bueno aunque siento que es algo abrupto a mi gusto, aunque se compensa bastante bien con la resolución de la trama planteada y la mayoría de sus misterios, así como con la carga filosófica y los dilemas morales de sus últimos capítulos. Cadence and Cascade hack into the ship's computer, taking it over, and take off from Neume with Hesperus and Purslane still aboard.
Sub-Lightspeed Setting: Countless millennia in the future clone-lines traveling the galaxy at near-lightspeed provide some continuity of civilization for the countless human and posthuman colonies across space. Yes, some of this is done with the technology of stasis cabinets and "Synchromesh," a time-altering drug that allows the subject to speed up or slow down their mind and body to match another who is phased out of "real" time. Human Subspecies: Humanity fractured into a million daughter species, some of which were scarcely recognisable to each other.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. It's not often that I feel indifferent to a book for as long as I did with this one but then end up absolutely loving it, but that's exactly what happened.
Part of the challenge of reviewing (or even talking about) Alastair's work lies in the fact that if you talk about it, you run the risk of rather spoiling the book. Some of my books and stories are set in a consistent future named after Revelation Space, the first novel, but I've done a lot of other things as well and I like to keep things fresh between books. Laser-Guided Amnesia: Since it's hard to hold massive amount of memories in human brains, one of the Reunion's purpose is to gather information from Line members, catalogue them, and wipe out memories that each individual members don't think is important enough to hold in their brain. I suppose this is true of all fiction, but I find it particularly so with the genres of Speculative Fiction, which are after all, more interested in investigating the “other” than fiction firmly rooted in the realm of realism often is.When my kid was three or four, they described in some detail, how they thought memories worked: there was a box of paintings in their brain, but sometimes the paintings got mixed up, sometimes the paint rubbed off or messed up, and sometimes the pictures got muddled and stuck together or torn. Childhood memories have already played an essential role in Chasm City, where it was part of showing the special attitude and shock frosted living cargo weight minimization attempts of Sky Hausmann. With too much telling and not enough showing, he leaves little for the reader to speculate and infer. El libro me ha dejado un muy buen sabor de boca y tengo muchas ganas de conocer los otros trabajos del autor.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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