House of Suns: Alastair Reynolds (GOLLANCZ S.F.)

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They went from 1000 members to only fifty after the initial attack on them, and with someone actively gunning for them, they are in real danger of being wiped out forever. Facets of Abigail Gentian, they are forbidden from consorting, but consort they most definitely have. Oh, and at some point a big event known as "the Absence" occurred: the Andromeda galaxy (apparently) winked out of existence. Individually known as "shatterlings", the Gentian Line is composed of slightly under a thousand clones made from a woman who lived in the 31st century.

And faced with concepts and events that span long stretches of millennia, the human mind tends to withdraw, to recoil, at the mere thought of too much time.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. For example, one of the lead characters is a machine intelligence but he's not presented as an android bashed out on an assembly line. Certainly when one of them was imperiled towards the end of the book, I was anxious that the situation resolved itself!

While I can understand why dear old Abigail (who is also a POV character in a minor way, as we see a number of flashbacks showing certain critical events of her childhood that led to the creation of the Gentian line and interstellar civilization) might have been squicked by two of her clones boinking (one wonders how incest laws will cover this when we perfect cloning), her shatterlings are going to be around for a long, long time, and they are still human. One major selling point is the feeling of deep time: the lifetime of a shatterling stretches into millions of years, and a typical journey through space can take thousands of years.Faster-Than-Light Travel: Humanity never broke the light speed barrier, and all travel has to be done STL, with everything that implies. Full too of pathos but also hope, an underlying belief that humans can and will survive, become something more than immature apes bent on destruction and go out and become part of the wider universe. 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.