Marek reviewed House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
Inhuman awe - a kind of "anti-Lovecraft"
4 stars
Reynolds has a particular knack for finding ways to make human experience mix with the utterly inhuman scales of time and space of space opera stories. By really obeying just one key rule (the speed of light as an absolute limit), he creates interesting phenomena in the parallax of experiences between the protagonists and the universe around them.
There are a number of facets to this story, some of them immediate and personal between people who move and spend time at absurd timescales because of relativistic and other effects, some between those members of such "meta-civilisations" with others outside of that scale, resulting in frictions and differences in perspective.
I enjoyed it, but as it went on, I found it to become strangely less compelling. While there was always a human angle to things, too much of the plot is delivered as exposition dumps regarding things that took …
Reynolds has a particular knack for finding ways to make human experience mix with the utterly inhuman scales of time and space of space opera stories. By really obeying just one key rule (the speed of light as an absolute limit), he creates interesting phenomena in the parallax of experiences between the protagonists and the universe around them.
There are a number of facets to this story, some of them immediate and personal between people who move and spend time at absurd timescales because of relativistic and other effects, some between those members of such "meta-civilisations" with others outside of that scale, resulting in frictions and differences in perspective.
I enjoyed it, but as it went on, I found it to become strangely less compelling. While there was always a human angle to things, too much of the plot is delivered as exposition dumps regarding things that took place tens of thousands to millions of years prior (though it does depend on frames of reference of course).
There's a particular aspect to how these stories work that are, I think, like a complementary viewpoint to Lovecraftian horror. Rather than a horror born of the incomprehensible, there is an awe of events, actions, or technologies on scales beyond human ken. For me, Lovecraft is a bit hit-and-miss because of this, and I'm finding the same here - sometimes you feel it, other times it is too abstract to really land, regardless of how clever it might be.
