I was listening to a science and futurism with Isaac Arthur episode about deep time and cryo ships and the book Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds was recommended and it sounded interesting so I gave it a read and Lord it was a really good book.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89186.Pushing_Ice
Edit: Just finished house of suns. Whoa!
I’m glad I got through the political parts of it at the beginning because the book itself was incredibly interesting, but I found the political part at the beginning to be kind of boring. I need to attempt to read House of Suns because I started it but didn’t get very far through it.
Yeah, the prologue and the interspersed bits with Bowerbird (I think that was her name) and the future people was a little weird, but not too jarring. They come into play toward the end of the book with the gift box nanotech thing, so I guess it was necessary to frame them in. It took me a while to figure out how they sent it from the future, but it was time dilation the whole time so no time travel.
House of Suns is my absolute favorite of Reynolds’ work. It’s the least “hard” sci-fi of the bunch but still follows the rules and basically takes all the ships and tech from his other works and cranks them up to 11. Such a fun read.
“Terminal World” is another fun standalone book from him if you come across it. If you feel up for a trilogy, the “Revenger” series is a fun space pirate adventure I quite enjoyed.