But never underestimate time. Alastair Reynolds does understand how large time can be. Doing so, he constructs a space opera, fully respecting causality and Einstein’s restrictions on space travel. As a former scientist, he introduces us to the shatterlings of Abigail Gentian. In order to explore more space than any woman could do alone, Abigail split herself into a thousand clones called shatterlings. After completing a circuit of the galaxy, they reunite to share memories with themselves, only to part again and stop in star systems to trade whatever they learned with the local populations of aliens and post-humans.
By following the story of two shatterlings in love, Alastair playfully explores the vastness of time and space in our universe, doubtlessly inspired by Fermi’s paradox: While the galaxy is big, the universe has existed more than long enough for civilization to colonize it lots of times. Yet, we see no sign of aliens. Where are they?
“‘Why did they die out?’ I asked, deciding that there was no point in hiding my ignorance.
‘Everybody dies out,’ Betony said. ‘That’s turnover.’” 1
Alastair himself held a TEDx Talk about this topic and called this particular explanation rather depressing. Maybe life is just not built to last for the thousands of years it takes to travel the galaxy. We develop weapons, get angry at one another, and wipe ourselves out.
The shatterlings in Alastair’s novel “House of Suns” defy this logic with a simple trick: They never settle down, are always on the move with relativistic velocities close to the speed of light, compressing time and living in abeyance: Sleeping, frozen, or enclosed in a time-lapsing bubble of space-time, they avoid experiencing the Deep Time necessary for interstellar adventures. With this, the protagonists of “House of Suns” remain relatable even though the vastness of their journey is hard to grasp.
“It would be a mistake to say that Campion was lazy, laziness being a trait that Abigail went out of her way to scrub from our personalities. But Campion was certainly a masterful prevaricator. He did not just put things off until tomorrow; he put them off for tens of kilo-years, until his delays and evasions consumed significant chunks of an entire circuit. His motto might have been ‘Why do today what you can still do in a quarter of a million years?’” 2
Campion, the male clone of our couple, at one point meets a giant alien, a curator of and memory, part of an old organization collecting information over millions of years. Their dialog shows how Reynolds manages to introduce its readers to the concepts of time without needing a science degree.
‘I’ve been very, very lucky. Lucky to have been born into Gentian Line, lucky to have been able to live through so much time without experiencing more than a fraction of it.’
‘To live through deep time would be considered unfortunate?’
‘I didn’t mean that, rather that I’m carrying a brain not so very different from the ones humans had when we were still hunter-gatherers. There are some modifications that help me process memories and the strands of my fellow shatterlings, but Abigail never touched the deep architecture. Our minds just aren’t engineered to experience that much time in the raw.’
’You would go mad.’ […]
„Are you as old as the Vigilance?’
‘That would make me more than five million years old, shatterling.’
‘I’m nearly six.’
‘Except you aren’t, really. You were born that long ago, but I doubt you have experienced more than a few tens of thousands of years of subjective time. You are a bookworm who has tunneled through the pages of history. Is that not so?’ 3
You somehow learn to understand kilo-years and grasp the distances within our galaxy, all within a gripping story of conflict, betrayal, adventure, and love. Few science fiction writers manage to tie the “science” with a moving and compelling plot as convincingly as Reynolds, bringing characters to life.
Of course, other works of fiction have covered the passage of time. “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky follows the evolution of spiders into intelligent close-by leaping through generations and stages of civilization. The anime “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” (葬送のフリーレン) dwells on the passage of time as viewed from the perspective of a long-living elf. Yodel explores this in his blog post (Italian original, machine translation) and discusses narrative time, distinguishing time of myth, time of legend, and time of memory. “Memory is a living substance,” as Yodel writes. But nowhere else than in Alastair Reynolds’s “House of Suns” have I seen time spans as large as the lifetimes of stars vividly. We can face Time’s gray forehead4 and look into the deep eyes of the universe — at least for a little. Space is always bigger and even Reynolds does not try to comprehend intergalactic timescales and the beast that it Boötes Void.
The “House of Suns” is great science fiction and also a great book. One could call it a full-blown space opera with the only difference that it does respect the speed of light without sacrificing emotion for plausibility. Alastair Reynolds demonstrates how exciting interstellar travel can be even without warp drives. A clear recommendation.
