House of Suns

House of Suns is a 2008 science fiction novel by the Welsh writer Alastair Reynolds, published by Gollancz and issued in paperback by Orion the following year. It was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2009.

The novel is set roughly six million years in the future, when humanity has spread across the galaxy and no other intelligent species has been found. In this setting the Gentian line, one of several groups that call themselves lines, exists to observe: each shatterling is a clone of the original Abigail Gentian, and the members travel separately for two hundred thousand years at a time before meeting at a reunion. Two of them, Purslane and Campion, arrive to find the gathering has been attacked, and the investigation into who is destroying the line carries them towards the Andromeda galaxy and towards the reason the shatterlings were made.

Reynolds works with the consequences of extreme duration: travel between stars takes thousands of years, civilisations disappear between visits, and the shatterlings' memories of their own past are the closest thing to continuity the setting allows.