House of Suns

House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds

Now there’s a novel that struts in wearing the trappings of grandeur, waving its big ideas around like a peacock showing off its tail feathers only to trip over its own self-importance halfway through. Alastair Reynolds clearly wants us to think we’re reading something profound, something cosmic, but good grief, it’s like listening to a very clever man explain the same idea for six hundred pages while staring admiringly at his own reflection.

I’ll give Reynolds this: the man can imagine a universe. Six million years of history, galaxy-spanning civilizations, clones of clones of clones. But good imagination isn’t the same as good storytelling. Reading this felt like being cornered by an astrophysicist at a dinner party who insists on describing the entire history of the cosmos before you can politely escape to the dessert table. Every time something interesting starts to happen he hits the brakes and launches into another lecture on relativistic time dilation or the ethics of machine intelligence.

The characters, bless them, are about as lively as museum exhibits. Every one of them talks in that same sterile, hyper-rational tone—as if Reynolds ran their dialogue through a grammar-checker that removed all trace of personality. And don’t tell me “they’re ancient clones who’ve transcended human emotion.” Fine, but must they also transcend being remotely interesting? If I wanted to read about emotionally inert immortals, I’d re-read the minutes from a city council meeting.

And then there’s the plot—oh, the plot. It starts as a grand mystery, full of promise and intrigue, then promptly folds in on itself like a dying star. We get betrayals, ancient secrets, cosmic revelations—all theoretically impressive, yet somehow utterly inert. There’s no tension because there’s no pulse. The story doesn’t move so much as drift, like space debris circling endlessly without ever hitting anything meaningful.

By the end, I wasn’t pondering the fate of post-human civilization; I was pondering whether I should have just re-read Dune instead. Reynolds seems allergic to brevity, allergic to warmth, and perhaps most fatally, allergic to the idea that science fiction should occasionally let the reader feel something other than fatigue.

In short, House of Suns is a novel of magnificent architecture and no furniture, a cathedral built for gods who never show up. It’s beautiful, yes, in that cold, mathematical way but about as inviting as a frozen planet.

2*