House of Suns: definitely not a review

Just finished this 'ere book by Al Reynolds.

Thoughts:

1) An alright 500 page book with a good 250 page book struggling to get out.

2) There is a lot of boring, pompous, non-political politics goes on in "the Line". I feel the concept of someone creating thousands of clones of themselves and sending them out to explore the galaxy is good, but Reynolds kind of let it go without thinking through how it would operate IRL.

3) I don't know if it's a style thing (Stephen Baxter does it as well) but none of the characters talk as people talk. Ken MacLeod is much better at this sort of thing.

4) The most interesting characters (the Doctor and the Spirit of the Wind) don't get nearly enough of the airtime that is instead given over to the unconvincing political pomposity.

That said I really enjoyed this book. It's not as good as Century Rain or Pushing Ice, but is considerably better than Prefect.