Since reading Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga a few months ago, I’ve been itching to get into his bestselling Night’s Dawn Trilogy, which I finally did this month. I’ve just finished the first whopping 1,200 page volume, The Reality Dysfunction.
It has great similarities to his more recent series – a grand, swooping, dynastic space-opera with hundreds of worlds, a complex political superstructure and economy, a fantastic cast of characters, and some very creative science and technology.
Where its different? Well, it tackles religion. And also the walking dead. The walking dead, needless to say, is where it gets really weird. I’ve never seen the word ‘sequestration’ used so many times, even in that density of pages – of course, its possible I’ve simply never seen the word used at all. How does it decline: I sequester, you sequester, he/she/it sequesterers…
The book is actually quite suspenseful at times (if not actually frightening), and I am looking forward to the next one. The sheer level of intricate detail he goes to is astonishing – everything resolves, eventually. I just need to get through the remaining 2,000 pages of the series to see what happens…
It’s a rather decent series all round – I wrote the initial review of The Reality Dysfunction for SFX – and as I know the cover artist, also now own the initial colour sketches and a limited edition print of the art, along with the original pen and ink sketch for The Neutronium Alchemist.
I’m still rather fond of the quote from my review that made its way onto the paperback. It’s more than you usually get when writing about technology!