House of Suns
Six million years ago, at the dawn of the star-faring era, Abigail Gentian fractured herself into a thousand male and female clones, which she called shatterlings. She sent them out into the galaxy to observe and document the rise and fall of countless human empires. Since then, every two hundred thousand years, they gather to exchange news and memories of their travels.Only this millennium there is no gathering. Someone is eliminating the Gentian line. And Campion and Purslane—two shatterlings who have fallen in love and shared forbidden experiences— must determine exactly who, or what, their enemy is, before they are wiped out of existence.
Stats for nerds
26recommend
46mentions
35people
2009–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Echoing others, Reynolds (House of Suns, Pushing Ice, the Revelation Space series), Stross (Accelerando, Glasshouse, and Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood are my favorites), and Rajaniemi (the Quantum Thief trilogy) scratch roughly the same itch for me.
- Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality titles to choose from even (compared to the previous millennium).
Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
- Blindsight by Peter Watts
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
Startide Rising by David Brin
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
Solaris by Stanisław Lem
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Translation State by Ann Leckie
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
This is what sprang to mind as answering that sort of brief off the top of my head.
- A bit “harder” sci-fi but incredible world building - Alastair Reynolds.
I recommend his short stories first - Galactic North is a good start. Or Beyond the Aquila Rift.
House of Suns is a good first novel.
- Also in 'House of Suns' by Alistair Reynolds.
The most revelatory idea for me in it was the idea of how a human being could plausibly become a near god-like entity.
This isn't even the real premise of the book but a brief detour over a few pages where the author expounds this idea.
The man, Valmik, starts off as a human much like any other. As the first stage in his metamorphosis he replaces his brain neuron by neuron, with mechanical parts.
Once this is done he no longer needs his body.
This now frees him from his mortal shell which he discards. He now lives purely as an electro-mechanical device for centuries. He shuns all his human contacts since they are unable to keep up with him.
At this point he starts adding more artificial neurons till his count surpasses several orders of magnitude of his starter human brain.
But he realises that he is still subject to the vicissitudes of the planet that the machine that's him is located in.
This he couldn't abide by.
At this next stage, the already superhuman intelligence formerly known as Valmik sets off on a space faring vehicle.
The endlessness of space is no bother to this entity, because he has no bounds on his longevity.
And so he travels the cosmos for millennia in this state, free from the erstwhile shackles binding him to Earth.
But he realises that even this is not enough. Just one well aimed shot would destroy him.
Not good enough for an immortal.
So he transforms each of his neurons into an independent self-sustaining machine. Each of these machines communicates with each other via light/EM beams.
The formerly comet sized machine that housed his consciousness was now split across these self sustaining machines.
These machines can now drift apart. As far apart as he wanted.
His brain was now a cloud consciousness that could span the size of solar systems.
But this expansion came at a cost.
The cost was this: transmission between his independent neuron nodes, now each far apart from one another, took time, limited by the speed of light.
Thoughts that would formerly take him micro seconds would now consume days. But that was no matter to this entity that had left all his companions behind and only needed to talk to himself.
And thus, Valmik, once man, now a cloud consciousness came to disperse himself all across the Oort cloud.
An immortal who can outlive the sun.
- I would not recommend 3 body problem. It may be because the French translation is bad but it felt really subpar.
I get the feeling 3 body problem is considered one of the best sci-fi books only by people who don't read sci-fi.
Not really recent but I'd recommend Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds (but I'm partial to Reynolds after the Revelation Space series and House of Suns) or if you like military sci-fi Marko Kloos' Frontline series.
