House of Suns: Difference between revisions
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'''''House of Suns''''' is a novel by Welsh Sci-fi author [[Alastair Reynolds]], set in [[Broad Strokes|more or less]] the same universe as the novella [https://web.archive.org/web/20120210172943/http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2008/audio-thousandth-night-by-alastair-reynolds/ Thousandth Night] -- tropes are listed here for both.
Six million years in the future, the entire galaxy is a [[Used Future]]. Tens of thousands of human civilizations have risen and fallen; the galaxy's been united under a single banner [[Eternal Recurrence|too many times to count]]. In the face of deep time, each galactic federation always falls. No one group endures.
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* [[Artificial Gravity]]: Used by the starships to propel themselves and to protect their occupants from the crushing force of their thrust.
* [[Big Dumb Object]]: The Vigilance.
* [[Body Horror]]: The far-future torture technique called 'sectioning
* [[Cool Starship]] : The ''Silver Wings Of Morning
* [[Creative Sterility]]: The original Machine People couldn't create art, but were fascinated by it.
* [[Deflector Shields]]: Used throughout the novel. A ubiquitous technology during the time of the novel. Also used for intertial dampening, as a ship's shields can be projected internally around its inhabitants, allowing extremely high-g maneuvers that would normally render everybody inside to jelly.
* [[Dyson Sphere]]: The Gentian Line's stardams, which can ''contain a supernova.''
* [[Floral Theme Naming]]: Gentian Line is known as the "House of Flowers", uses a five-petalled flower as their symbol, and all of the shatterlings in the Line are named after angiosperms (some more obliquely than others).
* [[Endangered Species]]: Though not a "species", per se, this is pretty much what happens to the Gentian Line. They went from 1000 members to only ''fifty'' after the initial attack on them, and with someone actively gunning for them, they are in real danger of being wiped out forever.
* [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]]: [[Zig-Zagging Trope|Zig-zagged]]:{{spoiler|
* [[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.}}
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* [[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 Gender Clone]]: Half the members of each of the Lines
* [[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.}}
* [[Precursors]]: The {{spoiler|Priors}}.
* [[Reactionless Drive]]
* [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old]] : The Shatterlings
* [[Rubber Forehead Aliens]]: Played with
* [[Send in the Clones]]: The shatterlings are all clones of Abigail Gentian or other humans in the far past (who particularly is what defines a Line); however, they've all been slightly modified, [[Opposite Gender Clone|and some are male]], so there's some variation. Better to think of them all as siblings who remember being the same child.
* [[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.
* [[Teleport Interdiction]]: How the ''Silver Wings Of Morning'' is hijacked.
* [[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.
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