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.
Large-scale human civilizations almost invariably seem to collapse and disappear within a few millennia (a phenomenon referred to as "turnover"), the limits of sub-lightspeed travel making it too difficult to hold interstellar empires together. Consequently, the most powerful entities in the galaxy are the "Lines" – familial organisations made of cloned "shatterlings". The Lines do not inhabit planets, but instead travel through space, holding reunions after they've performed a "circuit" of the galaxy; something that takes about 200,000 years.
House of Suns concerns the Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers, composed of 999 clones (or "shatterlings"), male and female, of Abigail Gentian, with Abigail being the 1,000th shatterling (exactly which of the 1,000 shatterlings is the original Abigail Gentian is unknown). The clones and Abigail travel the Milky Way Galaxy helping young civilizations, collecting knowledge and experiencing what the universe has to offer.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)