Book of the Month: House of Suns ***Spoilers***

I honestly think I should never ever ever admit this, but I still have not yet read that book. However, I am headed to amazon to grab a copy right after I hit reply. I do enjoy Alistair Reynolds but I haven't been able to pick up a book in over a year

Any favorite parts I should keep an eye out for?

I swear I am converting to audio books today. I am so far behind and making time to read it like making time for another part time job. I don't know how you get everything done that you do....

Just finished this on your recommendation, Isaac. Loved it, so thanks! Lots of interesting concepts here but one that really stuck me is in the universe of this book they still don't have FTL but this doesn't really matter for the shatterlings as they have an indefinite lifespan. The way they view civilisations popping in and out of existence and only being 45k years old (ancient by our standards) as a juvenile or infantile civilisation is a very interesting way to view time.

By coincidence I picked up House of Suns the same week you recommended it on your channel, and now having finished it I would say it's my second favorite Reynolds book after The Prefect. I thought the ending on the planet and Hesperus' sacrifice was really poignant. I initially thought the game subplot was a bit awkward too, but it makes more sense if you see it as artificial memory of the genocide against the first machine people. Abigail's memory of the boy's ghost soldiers dying to a spell represented the accidental virus unleashed on the machine people by the lines of the commonality, and Abigail's memory was implanted as a way of discouraging future decisions like that without revealing the truth of what they had done.

The reveal that the Andromeda galaxy had been veiled by the machines as a way of concealing wormhole FTL travel was a conceptually interesting way of getting around the paradoxes that arise from having something being able to travel somewhere before it could observe itself there. What I found implausible was the idea that the Commonality themselves could have wormhole weapons that spit out the energy of distant suns, and not have the ability to rig up a system of FTL communication with mini wormholes, and therefore have uploaded minds that could span the galaxy.

Mostly loved this book. And i don't always with AR. I love the idea of churn. This seems very plausible.

Cheap sake trope wormhole FTL and a galaxy being censored was lame. I read it not that the machine people censored it, but that was the effect of FTL. The censoring hypothesis. But it was a while ago that i read it.

My fav thing is Stasis pods or whatever it was called. A bubble of very slow too frozen time. You don't need to violate causality to have that. But the boundary conditions are interesting. Yea i tried to work it out. light coming into such a field would get blue shifted. At almost frozen time everything would be gamma rays.

Of course Peter Hamilton has the same idea with Zero Tau pods in his reality dysfunction trilogy.

Didn't' think revenger was his best. But better than the blue remembered earth series and pushing ice.

But have you seem the short animation Zima blue! It is super good. Almost exactly as i imagined the story! On netflix, one of the Love Death & Robots episodes.