HOUSE OF SUNS proves that Alastair Reynolds is still very much on his game. It’s not everyone who can write a novel that takes place over millions of years - about the same few characters - without its indulging in silly conceits. Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION series didn’t even try; it coped with these kinds of time-scales but in bite-sized pieces, ebbs and flows of civilizations, individual lens-views through normal human lives.

There are still people living that way in HOUSE OF SUNS – there is frequent talk of “turn-over” civilizations, regarded as human may-fly colonies by the protagonists. These protagonists, all cloned “shatterlings” of a common fore-mother, travel the galaxy at relativistic speeds, their lives prolonged by periods in abeyance (kind of like the Ultranauts in his REVELATION SPACE series, without the dreadlocks and extreme body modification and overall gothiness), are feeling their way toward solving a troubling mystery: why the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy seems to have disappeared.

The answer is surprising; the ending not, perhaps 100% satisfying but I forgive this because the trip on the way to that ending is worth it.

The characters are more sympathetic than usual for Reynolds; clearly he is only getting better at this. Campion and Purslane, the two point-of-view shatterlings, are utterly believable and true; Hesperus, the Machine Person who is swept up into their story, even more so. I found myself loving him most of all.

I took this in slowly because I didn’t want it to end, and was genuinely sad when it did. More please!