Reception
Lisa Tuttle reviewing for The Times called the novel a "thrilling, mind-boggling adventure" and said "as well as visionary brilliance, Reynolds also supplies a knock-your-socks-off ending."
Zack Handlen of the A.V. Club writes that Reynolds is particularly adept at conveying the vastness of space and the "inky blackness of the void," adding that House of Suns "keeps up the tradition of forward thinking while improving on the genre’s traditionally flat prose and clumsily drawn women. An immensely thrilling, mind-bending piece of work, House looks to the center of all that emptiness and finds its beating heart."
At SF Signal, a reviewer notes that a "sense of wonder is where this book excels," adding that "Reynolds is playing on a galactic-sized canvas and uses believable science to back up his grand ideas...his yields mind-boggling time scales, where millennia pass by like days."
George Williams in his review for The Australian said that "the concepts explored in House of Suns are so far removed from our time, and even from much of the standard fare of science fiction, that parts of the book border on fantasy. The author does carry off a story conceived on a scale rarely seen in science fiction. The weaknesses of the book relate to some of the old staples of novel writing. While the pace picks up at the end, it starts too slowly and at times the plot meanders. The novel may be filled with rich ideas, but neither of the two leads compels interest and the relationship between them is underdeveloped. It is a pity that these aspects of the book fail to achieve the same heights as the universe in which it is set."
Read more about this topic: House Of Suns
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)