House of Suns

House of Suns is a 2008 science fiction novel by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds announced the title on 7 June 2007, when he was about halfway through writing it. It is set in the same universe as his novella "Thousandth Night", which appears in the anthology One Million A.D., although he has stated on his blog that House of Suns "does not attempt slavish consistency" with "Thousandth Night" (some characters killed in the novella make an appearance in House of Suns). The novel was shortlisted for the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Setting

The main story arc is set approximately 6 million years in the future. Humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy, which appears devoid of any other organic sentient life. The galaxy is populated by many civilizations of humans and various posthumans of widely varying levels of development. A civilization of sentient robots known as the Machine People has also developed, and coexists peacefully with humanity. Technologies of the era include anti-gravity, inertial dampening, force fields, stellar engineering, and stasis fields. Also of note is the "Absence"—the mysterious disappearance of the Andromeda Galaxy.