Alastair Reynolds has been both one of my favorite, and most hated authors. I tend to enjoy his one-shots more than his series, maybe because he doesn’t have time to write himself into a corner. So too with House of Suns, a book I neglected reading for over a year because I was so put off by Absolution Gap’s meandering nonsense.
Gladly, House of Suns returns to what I love about Reynolds’ writing.
When I’m reading multiple books simultaneously, it’s usually because I’ve relegated one to my “before bed” pile. Absolution Gap, the conclusion of Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space series, was one of those. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the longer books I’ve attacked in a couple months, and half an hour per night hardly pays quick dividends. Even worse, Reynolds’ writing style is copious and unrelenting; I felt every single one of those pages.
Once again, Alastair Reynolds cranks out a weighty tome in Redemption Ark (Part of the Revelation Space universe) that proves, at least to me, hard SciFi can be surprisingly entertaining.
Part of the problem with sticking directly to physics, as Alastair with his Ph.D. in Astronomy is likely to do, is that space travel is necessarily limited to current breakthroughs in physics, even when targeted hundreds or thousands of years in the future.
