39,327
edits
House of Suns: Difference between revisions
update links
Derivative (talk | contribs) m (→top: Fixing links to disambiguation pages) |
(update links) |
||
Line 15:
{{tropelist}}
* [[
* [[Alien Sky]]: The world that the novel starts on has a special atmospheric bubble which, at night, amplifies faint stars and nebulae, creating a very colorful night sky.
* [[Artificial Gravity]]: Used by the starships to propel themselves and to protect their occupants from the crushing force of their thrust.
Line 28:
* [[Ghost Planet]]: Implied to be very common throughout the galaxy. Since the various descendants of humanity have been cavorting around the galaxy for the past six million years, there are plenty of planets that once played host to technological civilizations only to leave nothing behind but ruins.
* [[Humans Are the Real Monsters]]: {{spoiler|In ''House Of Suns'', the Lines come into contact with a curious, benign robotic civilization spawned from human technology. The Lines develop a virus to disable the robots if they pose a threat to human civilization, triggered remotely.}} Except, {{spoiler|The virus suddenly goes off and begins wiping out the civilization, and the Lines desperately cover it up by ignoring the robots, and then cover it up, by wiping out entire human civilizations and indvidual Lines.}}
* [[The Fog of Ages]]: The long-lived protagonists, considering they've lived through ''six million years'' (though, admittedly, only a couple tens of thousands of those concious). They routinely re-arrange/edit their memory. It's implied that they could hold all of their memories at once, if they wanted to, but having that many memories would affect their personality so drastically that most choose not to. Most the long-lived characters tend to hold a rough cliff-notes version of their memories in their heads, but not any of the details; the main character Campion intentionally prioritizes his "recent" memories, which in part drives the main plot.
* [[Humanity's Wake]]: Due to the sheer number of civilizations that have come before, it seems you can't go ''anywhere'' in the galaxy without bumping into some planet that was colonized, terraformed, rose to prominence, became the center of a galactic civilization, then died out, leaving the ruins to be colonized again by whatever evolved in the three million years that has passed...
* [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place]]: Well, wormholespace anyways.
* [[Laser-Guided Amnesia]]: Becomes a major plot point. See also [[The Fog of Ages]] entry above.
* [[Mechanical Lifeforms]]: The Machine People, a race of human-looking androids with a little bit of [[Clockwork Creature|clockwork features]] thrown in for flair. Despite having been around for millions of years, undergoing their own [[Mechanical Evolution]], there's still [[Fantastic Racism|people who think]] of them as [[Just a Machine|nothing more than mindless automatons who just ''imitate'' sentience]].
* [[Opposite
* [[Portal Network]]: {{spoiler|The First Machine that Campion meets tells him that there are wormholes throughout the Andromeda galaxy which lead to different galaxies throughout the universe. It also speculates that the 250-million-light-year-wide [[Unnecessarily Large Interior|Boötes void]][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootes_Void\] could actually be full of galaxies connected by wormholes, but that each galaxy is otherwise blocked from the rest of the universe so they can use their wormholes for pseudo-FTL travel without violating causality.}}
* [[Reactionless Drive]]
* [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old]] : The Shatterlings in ''House Of Suns'' are about 6.4 '''million''' years old, though "only" a couple hundred thousand of those are spent awake.
* [[Rubber Forehead Aliens]]: Played with in '''''House of Suns''''', as the entire population of the Milky Way Galaxy can trace its ultimate ancestry back to Earth.
* [[Send in the Clones]]: The shatterlings are all clones of Abigail Gentian; however, they've all been slightly modified, [[Opposite
* [[Shout-Out]]: This book is pretty much every single Alan Parson's Project song title smashed into a Space Opera screen play.
* [[Space Opera]]: And how!
* [[Stern Chase]]: Across 60,000 light-years of interstellar space.
* [[That's No Moon]]: The protagonists stop at a ringed gas giant because they heard about a spaceship salesman who lives there. They enter the atmosphere and find that he only has a few ships to sell. After some coercion, he shows them his entire collection of ships, {{spoiler|which were hidden inside and disguised as part of the gas giant's ring system.}}
* [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill]]: When the shatterling's reunion world is destroyed by the entities trying to wipe out the Gentian Line.
** The world is [[Kill Sat|bombarded from orbit]] and it's [[Death From Above|atmosphere is boiled off]] from the sheer energies of the onslaught. Normally that'd be enough to kill anyone, but the aggressors just keep on going, continuing to bombard the planet [[Death in All Directions|until the crust melts completely]]. ''[[Humiliation Conga|They still keep on going]]'', pumping so much energy into the planet that it literally [[Earthshattering Kaboom|just expands from the heat and disintegrates in a slow-motion kaboom]].
* [[Time Dilation]]: The main reason the Gentian Line has persisted for so long. Also, an unavoidable consequence of pretty much ''any'' kind of space travel, since if you want to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time (read: within a couple thousand years), you pretty much have to crank up the g's until you're near lightspeed.
* [[Unusual User Interface]]: Palatial, a sort-of holodeck. It's a small room, but as you walk in you are immersed in a vibrant, computer-generated world. Your brain is continually scanned while you are in it, so the world constantly adjusts and changes according to your wishes.
| |||