Laser-Guided Amnesia: Since it's hard to hold massive amount of memories in human brains, one of the Reunion's purpose is to gather information from Line members, catalogue them, and wipe out memories that each individual members don't think is important enough to hold in their brain.

Which brings me to another quote from the book: "Yes, humanity fractured into a million daughter species, some of which were scarcely recognisable to each other. He also guides the reader to understand the immense timescales that these characters deal with (many of them are millions of years old) without being boring or redundant. House of Suns posits, in the beginning, technology beyond many of the most forward thinkers' wildest imaginations. On the time scale of the galaxy, it's not all that unlikely that a sapient species could evolve, expand, and then go extinct in the space of a few million years, with huge gaps between such species. and then there just a few too many comparisons with things that are archaic even by todays wordage and would certainly be lost in a narrative in the first person set millions of years into the future.This is a minor (story-wise) mystery mentioned early on; naturally, it proves to be significant later. An interesting feature of this book is how often voices are often commented on, and sometimes critical decisions are made by inferring something from a character’s tone of voice.

I've read most of Alastair Reynolds's SF novels and enjoyed them all, but "House of Suns" is exceptional, even by his high standards. The above passage from House of Suns serves to illustrate the author's grandiose scheme for this book. V. Club wrote 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. Sci-fi is commonly castigated (perhaps unfairly) as overly masculine in terms of authors, readers, and the characters within. The first person narrative is split into that of three protagonists, actually only one protagonist in a way.The surviving shatterlings have to dodge exotic weapons while they regroup to try to solve the mystery of who is persecuting them, and why - before their ancient line is wiped out of existence, forever.