House of Suns

“No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.”

This had all the makings of a great book for me, but it ended up feeling like the harder I tried putting the pieces together, the worse the book felt. Such a great story idea! Great writing! (Theoretically) interesting characters! But once you start putting any sort of thought into what was going on, the cracks start showing. Ultimately I rated this based on feel—I had a lot of fun reading it in the moment—but the ending turns the story into a big nothingburger of a letdown.

Because of the sheer scale of this book, it's hard to summarize. A regular gathering (every 200,000 years) of the clones of Abigail, a brilliant scientist and founder of the Gentian Line, goes terribly wrong, and the investigation into why this all happened is the core plot of the book. We get to know a few of these clones (called Shatterlings) throughout the course of the investigation as they retreat to a desert planet to lick their wounds and regroup. Campion and Purslane, the two main characters of the book, rescued a member of the Machine People (a technology-based race of beings) on the way to the reunion, who ends up playing a critical role in how everything plays out.

I'm being very brief with this summary because it's kind of hard to pin down. Heavy spoilers in this section.

The author throws lots of misdirection at the audience throughout the book, which I found a bit distracting. It seems like every character, Shatterling or not, gets the "oh, maybe this character did it" treatment at some point, which can be fun if done right, but I sort of found annoying in this book. Dribbles of information about the endgame plot are doled out throughout the investigation, but not a lot of it ends up being fleshed out to any satisfying degree in the end. The characters introduced never seem to come together for me either, as motives and actions seemed inconsistent from scene to scene, and several characters introduced are basically forgotten by the end. I also was somewhat annoyed with the Architect-like character at the end (remember him, from The Matrix?), where we get a lot of heavy, enigmatic plot reveal and then the book ends. It felt like I had to build my own fanfic ending in my head from the plot/revelations left hanging, as if the author didn't really have a clear idea of how to end things himself.

I don't know, clearly I'm missing something a lot of other people seemed to get. It looked like it was going to be a fun sci-fi ride, but the book missed the mark by lightyears somewhere along the way.