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

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Hesperus is discovered to have a human arm underneath his metal exterior, a fact that even he can't explain due to his amnesia. We had shared memories… I could taste and feel her other lovers… each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had dabbled in far future settings with my Merlin stories, but they were set a mere 72,000 years from now – barely beyond the middle of next week, in cosmological terms. However, Reynolds does such a good job overall that it is easy to forgive this small aspect - a stunning and extremely enjoyable book! Intelligent, well-written escapism about encounters between advanced human intelligences and even more advanced machine intelligences.

Which brings me to another quote from the book: "Yes, humanity fractured into a million daughter species, some of which were scarcely recognisable to each other. In my spare time I am a very keen runner, and I also enjoying hill-walking, birdwatching, horse-riding, guitar and model-making. El libro me ha dejado un muy buen sabor de boca y tengo muchas ganas de conocer los otros trabajos del autor.

I'm also familiar with relativity and am fairly comfortable, as a historian, with the concept of "Longue Duree" history.

Lo que más destaca es este mundo (o mejor dicho galaxia) que a primera vista pueda parecer rebuscado, está muy bien planteado y es incluso plausible, es genial ir descubriendo la complejidad que tiene, las facciones que posee y como las acciones de los personajes pueden tener repercusiones incluso millones de años después. Whilst other members of the Line don’t really get the same level of characterisation as Campion, Purslane and Hesperus, this core trio have more than enough charm and personality to get you personally invested in their fates. But when two of you see it… knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold and incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together… that’s worth more than one plus one. Facets of Abigail Gentian, they are forbidden from consorting, but consort they most definitely have.Large-scale human civilizations almost invariably seem to collapse and disappear within a few millennia (a phenomenon referred to as "turnover"), the limits of sub-lightspeed travel making it too difficult to hold interstellar empires together. But the wayward shatterlings get more than the scolding they expect: they face the discovery that someone has a very serious grudge against the Gentian line, and there is a very real possibility of traitors in their midst.

Disappointing, as I was very intrigued by his darker brand of sci-fi in the form of the Revelation Space series.Individually known as "shatterlings", the Gentian Line is composed of slightly under a thousand clones made from a woman who lived in the 31st century.