They manage to find the remains of a ship with several Gentian members still alive, and rescue them and the four enemy prisoners they had captured. The most interesting aspect is not the ethical one of editing and deleting, but the deeper, psychological effects of memories and personalities merging and melding: shatterlings who share DNA and a childhood, and convene to combine their latest experiences; those who become part of overly-realistic virtual reality; and machine intelligences that can split and then coalesce and confugure their minds with other machines and even post-humans.

Their relationship could be seen as problematic, of course, and certainly would be by their fellow shatterlings (is it incestuous to sleep with a fellow clone, or the ultimate act of narcissism?Approximately six million years in the future, humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy, which appears devoid of any other organic sentient life. It would be a shame to spoil any of the treats within for those who haven’t read House of Suns, but Campion’s encounter with The Vigilance, the entities that hunger for the universe’s data, is an early highlight, and one of many. Reynolds's science is not only tremendously creative, it becomes wholly believable through his skilful writing, so that this extraordinary tale, told over a span of tens of thousands of years, following characters that have been alive for millions of years, becomes as natural as popping down the road for some fish `n' chips!

So I made the decision that House of Suns would take its cue from the events and characters in the shorter piece, but it wouldn’t be afraid to contradict them if that made for a better story.This book is thoroughly enjoyable, and I certainly got to the end wishing there were other books in this universe that I could move onto next. My story, “Thousandth Night”, dealt with a group of cloned immortal star travellers, and featured the large scale reengineering of the entire Milky Way as one of its plot points. Poor characterization + uneven plotting + weird science (and I don't mean the 1980s kind) = barely finish. Lo que más destaca es este mundo (o mejor dicho galaxia) que a primera vista pueda parecer rebuscado, está muy bien planteado y es incluso plausible, es genial ir descubriendo la complejidad que tiene, las facciones que posee y como las acciones de los personajes pueden tener repercusiones incluso millones de años después. Many of those empires were benevolent and welcoming, but others were inimical to all outside influences.