Books – House of Suns

I’m close to catching up with Alastair Reynolds’ novels now. As noted in my post on The Prefect I’d missed The House of Suns when it came out so ordered it, along with Blue Remembered Earth. I’ve had a cold the last week so didn’t get around to posting about Terminal World yet so I thought I’d do them in order of publication instead of order of reading. There’s a comment I want to make on Terminal World about House of Suns, anyway, so it makes more sense in that order.

( Spoliers Ahead )

Books – Terminal World

An interesting departure for Reynolds here. It’s basically a steampunk. A far future steampuk reminiscent of a number of the others from the last few years in some ways. There’s some shades of Stephen Hunt’s work here. Airships, of course, steam-driven cyborgs. Also brain-eating cyborgs. But in true Reynolds style there’s a big incomprehensible “object” right in the middle of this, driving the story. This is a real contrast to House of Suns in some ways. House of Suns is a Deep Time story with characters trailing around for centuries during the story and millions of years over past history. The characters in this one, though, have histories of tens of years and tha action takes place over months on the surface of one planet, probably Earth, though a really changed one. There’s been a glut of steampunk in the last few years, much of it pretty derivative and apologist for rotten early-stage civilisations. This isn’t one of those. It’s a complex mix of hard science physics speculation, biological and nano-tech high concept, mysterious objects and a personal struggle against mind-bending odds. Wonderful stuff, basically.

Current Mood: convalescent

Originally published at blog.a-cubed.info