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

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Also used for inertial dampening, as a ship's shields can be projected internally around its inhabitants, allowing extremely high-g maneuvers that would normally render everybody inside to jelly. The entries for very advanced tech levels were rather obtuse and never really given much detail as to how the technology worked or what it enabled. Before preparing to depart Andromeda to follow its kin, the First Machine tells Campion that Purslane and Hesperus barely survived the passage into Andromeda. Campion and Purslane's relationship is realistic, but it's just a plot point, and they never stood out as individuals.

What sets House of Suns far apart from other space operas is the sheer scope and scale of the thing and the fact that the immensity of it all does not drown the beautiful humanity displayed by the main characters, Campion and Purslane, two clones of the Gentian line who have been illicitly involved in a forbidden relationship with one another. Many of those empires were benevolent and welcoming, but others were inimical to all outside influences. We'd probably be seeing it half a dozen civilisations down the line, when the Ymirians will just be a memory. Sent out into the galaxy, these shatterlings have stood aloof as they document the rise and fall of countless human empires.

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. Just take real life examples from biology, viruses, intelligence in insect colonies,… or technology, viruses again, microscopic robots,. They went from 1000 members to only fifty after the initial attack on them, and with someone actively gunning for them, they are in real danger of being wiped out forever. One of Reynolds´single novels, it deals with immortality, childhood trauma through alternative upbringing involving simulations and AIs, an option how conglomerates could evolve, machine intelligence in the form of old and new robots, a crime in the past, future torture methods, and thereby unites anything that makes Sci-Fi great.

It exists in that sweet spot directly between what you currently understand, and what you are capable of understanding. This book is filled with inaccurate memories: “strands to edit, memories to delete, others to falsify”. I was born in Wales, but raised in Cornwall, and then spent time in the north of England and Scotland.

The stunning science would be no good without a good yarn to tell, and Reynolds excels himself on "House of Suns". One of the constraints of the game was that any given planet could have a "technology level" that indicated how far technology had advanced on that planet, whether from native growth or from outside colonists. I had already seen dozens of empires come and go, blossoming and fading like lilies on a pond, over and over, seasons without end. An interesting feature of this book is how often voices are often commented on, and sometimes critical decisions are made by inferring something from a character’s tone of voice.