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

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I'm not going to reveal details of the plot - I always view that as a "spoiler" - suffice to say that this is the best SF book I have read for about 30 years! 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. While it does not appear to host an atmosphere it does have much stronger gravity than it should due to the black hole in the center of it. However, Reynolds does such a good job overall that it is easy to forgive this small aspect - a stunning and extremely enjoyable book!

Faster-Than-Light Travel: Humanity never broke the light speed barrier, and all travel has to be done STL, with everything that implies. House of Suns is set in a different universe than the Revelation Space series, and centres on a group (family? The surviving shatterlings have to dodge exotic weapons while they regroup to try to solve the mystery of who is persecuting them, and why - before their ancient line is wiped out of existence, for ever. Laser-Guided Amnesia: Since it's hard to hold massive amount of memories in human brains, one of the Reunion's purpose is to gather information from Line members, catalogue them, and wipe out memories that each individual members don't think is important enough to hold in their brain. It was indeed – it uses the setting and some characters from the novella Thousandth Night (which I haven’t read).Intelligent, well-written escapism about encounters between advanced human intelligences and even more advanced machine intelligences.

The most impressive thing is the world building, and how the complex science becomes understandable and readable in a way that you don't normally find in these types of books. They each diverged in the ensuing 6 million years, but there is still a strong taboo against shatterlings associating too closely outside of Celebration. I started off publishing short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone in the early 90s, then eventually branched into novels. One day, I couldn’t find them in in the supermarket, so asked a nearby member of staff where the King Flakes were. They take a detour to contact a posthuman known as ‘Ateshga’ in hopes of getting a replacement ship for Campion because his is getting old (several million years old).But hey, if the cyborgs look exactly like the parents, they could assist them and the important bonding and conditioning on certain faces is still there, so where could be a problem? The Commonality (a confederation of the various Lines), horrified and ashamed of this pointless genocide, erased all knowledge of the event from historical records and their own memories. The ways in which they are similar just reinforce the fact that they started from a near identical point.