I kick-started my book list for 2012 by shotgunning all three books in Peter F. Hamilton’s Void Trilogy: The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void, and The Evolutionary Void. This netted me a whopping 1973 pages in a little over 3 weeks. I’m pretty sure the last time I consumed that many pages from a single series back-to-back-to-back was either when I first got my hands on George R. R. Martin at Christmas 2003, or maybe the Kusheline Trilogy in 2006. Either way, it’s been a damn long time since I was compelled to read so much so quickly.
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of literature that can be classified as “massively multi-genre.” Tad Williams and China Mieville are high of my list of favorite authors due to their ability to produce works that break out of the typical genre stereotypes. When I picked up The Dreaming Void, I was expecting good old-fashioned hard sci-fi, softened up with a bit of decent character development – you know, pretty much what I had come to expect when I read Hamilton’s Pandora Star and Judas Unchained.
My expectations were met for about a hundred pages. I was enjoying the story and the characters, and I was tickled pink to see a lot of familiar faces from his previous duology. I was finding the technology a little less accessible that that of Pandora’s Star; the story is sufficiently far in the future that technology has progressed to the point of “sufficiently advanced as to seem like magic.”
Then all of the sudden I started a new chapter and the book went from hard sci-fi to medieval fantasy.
I was… baffled, to say the least, but I greedily enjoyed the change of pace, expecting it to be a one-off occurrence. It wasn’t. With increasing frequency you start to get glimpses into the fantasy-esque world inside the void, and see how that ties in with the sci-fi world outside. I loved the juxtaposition, and honestly felt myself more attached to most of the void characters than anyone outside. At the end of the second book I was literally choking and crying on the plane. I’ve never read a sci-fi classified book that moved me so much.
I can’t recommend these books enough for fans of either sci-fi or fantasy. If you’ve never dabbled in sci-fi as a genre this might be an ambitious start, but anyone who enjoys the genre (or wants to be convinced that the genre can be enjoyable) would be well served by picking up the Void Trilogy. My books for the rest of the year are going to be hard-pressed to live up to such an excellent start.
Showing posts with label peter hamilton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peter hamilton. Show all posts
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
[Lisa’s Take] Pandora’s Star – Peter F. Hamilton
First thing first. Pandora’s Star is a great book. It’s exciting and interesting and original. It is to Sci-Fi what Tad Williams’ Otherworld is to Fantasy: epic, sweeping, exploratory –full of awesome and strange worlds that house interesting and sympathetic characters. Weeks after finishing it I’m still mulling over certain themes and situations. That said, I have a few words for Mr. Hamilton...
Dude. Seriously. Close to a thousand pages and you couldn’t write a damn ending to your book? Really? A cliffhanger is the best you could manage? Oh, and we need to have a little discussion about character names. In the first 50ish pages, you accidentally named 2 characters “Nigel.” One is a major player, and one is a little bit-character. I know this sort of thing happens in real life, but do me a favor and don’t confuse me while reading. On a related note, it would be fantastic if you could do a better job differentiating your characters and making them memorable. You had it down by the 2/3 mark of the book, but for at least 500 pages it was a struggle to figure out who was who. Oh, speaking of things you had down by the end of the book – good god could your chapter structure have BEEN more formulaic at the start? For hundreds of pages every single chapter started with a character-context-free, long-winded description of a technology or planet that went on for pages and pages before you finally remembered what was going on and reigned yourself in with a quiet little “ahem, where was I? Oh yeah, I was supposed to be talking about THIS character.” I know from the second half of the book that you can build worlds and environments incredibly well without going on tangential rants – why didn’t you apply that approach to the first half of the book?
*pant...pant... deeeeep breath*
Sorry. That got away from me a bit. I don’t know why anyone ever lets me rant.
Anyway, I obviously had quite a few gripes about Pandora’s Star but for all of that it was a fantastic read and I will absolutely be picking up the sequel. I loved Hamilton’s world building and his ideas about technology were incredibly cool. I was especially impressed by his investigation of body rejuvenation and the potential effects on marriage, friendship, and family. Maybe it’s just my lack of sci-fi reading for the past 10 years, but I also thought it was insightful to come up with a space exploration mechanism that made ships and shuttles obsolete. Like I said – still mulling over the book’s themes weeks later.
Bottom line: I think I’d classify Pandora’s Star as a staple of any sci-fi diet. Yes, it tweaked quite a few of my pet peeves, but it also managed to pretty much blow me away. Excellent.
Dude. Seriously. Close to a thousand pages and you couldn’t write a damn ending to your book? Really? A cliffhanger is the best you could manage? Oh, and we need to have a little discussion about character names. In the first 50ish pages, you accidentally named 2 characters “Nigel.” One is a major player, and one is a little bit-character. I know this sort of thing happens in real life, but do me a favor and don’t confuse me while reading. On a related note, it would be fantastic if you could do a better job differentiating your characters and making them memorable. You had it down by the 2/3 mark of the book, but for at least 500 pages it was a struggle to figure out who was who. Oh, speaking of things you had down by the end of the book – good god could your chapter structure have BEEN more formulaic at the start? For hundreds of pages every single chapter started with a character-context-free, long-winded description of a technology or planet that went on for pages and pages before you finally remembered what was going on and reigned yourself in with a quiet little “ahem, where was I? Oh yeah, I was supposed to be talking about THIS character.” I know from the second half of the book that you can build worlds and environments incredibly well without going on tangential rants – why didn’t you apply that approach to the first half of the book?
*pant...pant... deeeeep breath*
Sorry. That got away from me a bit. I don’t know why anyone ever lets me rant.
Anyway, I obviously had quite a few gripes about Pandora’s Star but for all of that it was a fantastic read and I will absolutely be picking up the sequel. I loved Hamilton’s world building and his ideas about technology were incredibly cool. I was especially impressed by his investigation of body rejuvenation and the potential effects on marriage, friendship, and family. Maybe it’s just my lack of sci-fi reading for the past 10 years, but I also thought it was insightful to come up with a space exploration mechanism that made ships and shuttles obsolete. Like I said – still mulling over the book’s themes weeks later.
Bottom line: I think I’d classify Pandora’s Star as a staple of any sci-fi diet. Yes, it tweaked quite a few of my pet peeves, but it also managed to pretty much blow me away. Excellent.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
JD's Take: Misspent Youth (Peter F. Hamilton)
I love Peter F. Hamilton so it was without thought or hesitation that I picked up Misspent Youth. I barely even complained that it seemed to come out between The Dreaming Void and The Temporal Void, figuring that maybe he wrote it before those. I don't know. Publishing is a weird game. Besides, I correctly assumed, I'll probably still end up reading the Temporal Void first, my stack being what it is and my priorities being what they are.
So, I finally got around to pulling this off the shelf last week, and discovered that Hamilton had put aside Space Opera to take a stab at Near Futurism. This, I thought, ought to be good. Hamilton is an absolute master of extrapolating technology in interesting ways! However, my excitement slowly faded into... not disgust but at least apathy. By halfway through the book, I had no desire to open it again and placed it, sadly, on the shelf.
So what went wrong? The story follows a well-off family in 2038-ish England. The father is missing, gone to get the world's first Rejuvination treatment. This rare honor was given because of his massive popularity and fame, having invented a crystal memory lattice that could be grown cheaply and provided unlimited storage space... and then giving it away for freesies. His beloved son and trophy wife are waiting for him to return from the 8 months in isolation, and the security teams from the EU are setting up shop to protect against terrorist assasination attempts. So far so awesome, yeah? The problem is that when Hamilton turned in Space Opera, he traded it out for Soap Opera. The first part of the book was spent following the son and his friends in their drama-tastic sexual exchanges. Then the dad comes back and we get more of the same with the father. And the Wife. And the neighbors, the old friends, and probably the postman.
The technological and societal extrapolation was interesting, but very much in the background. Normally I'd consider that a good point, but in this case the foreground was filled with vapid, unlikable characters. The greater sin, however, was that like all Soap Operas, this novel lacked any kind of real plot. There was no conflict, no villian, no political intrigue. There was nothing to keep me reading unless I actually cared if the Father and the Son's Girlfriend would hook up (really. That was the big suspense when I set it down).
So give this one a miss, and busy yourself reading everything else this man ever wrote.
So, I finally got around to pulling this off the shelf last week, and discovered that Hamilton had put aside Space Opera to take a stab at Near Futurism. This, I thought, ought to be good. Hamilton is an absolute master of extrapolating technology in interesting ways! However, my excitement slowly faded into... not disgust but at least apathy. By halfway through the book, I had no desire to open it again and placed it, sadly, on the shelf.
So what went wrong? The story follows a well-off family in 2038-ish England. The father is missing, gone to get the world's first Rejuvination treatment. This rare honor was given because of his massive popularity and fame, having invented a crystal memory lattice that could be grown cheaply and provided unlimited storage space... and then giving it away for freesies. His beloved son and trophy wife are waiting for him to return from the 8 months in isolation, and the security teams from the EU are setting up shop to protect against terrorist assasination attempts. So far so awesome, yeah? The problem is that when Hamilton turned in Space Opera, he traded it out for Soap Opera. The first part of the book was spent following the son and his friends in their drama-tastic sexual exchanges. Then the dad comes back and we get more of the same with the father. And the Wife. And the neighbors, the old friends, and probably the postman.
The technological and societal extrapolation was interesting, but very much in the background. Normally I'd consider that a good point, but in this case the foreground was filled with vapid, unlikable characters. The greater sin, however, was that like all Soap Operas, this novel lacked any kind of real plot. There was no conflict, no villian, no political intrigue. There was nothing to keep me reading unless I actually cared if the Father and the Son's Girlfriend would hook up (really. That was the big suspense when I set it down).
So give this one a miss, and busy yourself reading everything else this man ever wrote.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
JD's Take: The Dreaming Void (Peter F. Hamilton)
The Dreaming Void takes place 1500 years after the events chronicled in Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained and begins a new trilogy set in the same world. Which, of course, means that I really should have written reviews for those books as well... but I didn't. Ah well. *looks* Actually, I did write a review of Pandora's Star! Haha! Victory for me!
Mr. Hamilton is very good and making deep, interesting, characters set in wildly fantastic science fiction settings, which makes me very, very happy. In this novel we see him extrapolate the technology advances (and corresponding technology shifts) from the first series by 15 centuries, which is an interesting intellectual exercise that he handles with a deft hand and a keen sense that the story and the characters are far more important than the exercise. The new characters introduced are fascinating and really drew me into the story. Ironically, the older characters that I already knew from the previous books seemed... awkward. It's very possible that this was intentional... their reasons for remaining in the corporeal world are varied, but they are by far the exception and so they stand apart from the society they've watched grow and change. I won't give away which characters return, but there are a couple of old favorites and a couple of surprises still kicking around the galaxy.
I didn't really get drawn into the story until about halfway through the book but, at the same time, I was never bored in the least. It just... took him a while to reach the narrative "tipping point", where the story and the characters that have the weight to roll along on their own inertia... each interaction giving more energy to the force of the narrative flow. Those who like their books to each stand alone will be disappointed... as the first book in a Hamiltonian trilogy there are so many loose ends at the conclusion of the book that it hardly even has a climax. There is plenty of cool shit going on, but no thread of the story reached an end. This is no surprise to anyone who has read any of Hamilton's other work... he writes epic scale sci fi and he does it beautifully. For me, I wasn't disapointed by the end... only eager for the next tome.
Overall, I'd call this a promising introduction to the new trilogy, and an exciting expansion of the wonderful world he created in the previous books. I'm inordinately pleased to be looking forward again to another Hamilton novel to appear on the shelves... I was pretty bummed when I finished Judas and realized that it might be a while before I saw more from my favorite comtemporary SciFi writer.
Mr. Hamilton is very good and making deep, interesting, characters set in wildly fantastic science fiction settings, which makes me very, very happy. In this novel we see him extrapolate the technology advances (and corresponding technology shifts) from the first series by 15 centuries, which is an interesting intellectual exercise that he handles with a deft hand and a keen sense that the story and the characters are far more important than the exercise. The new characters introduced are fascinating and really drew me into the story. Ironically, the older characters that I already knew from the previous books seemed... awkward. It's very possible that this was intentional... their reasons for remaining in the corporeal world are varied, but they are by far the exception and so they stand apart from the society they've watched grow and change. I won't give away which characters return, but there are a couple of old favorites and a couple of surprises still kicking around the galaxy.
I didn't really get drawn into the story until about halfway through the book but, at the same time, I was never bored in the least. It just... took him a while to reach the narrative "tipping point", where the story and the characters that have the weight to roll along on their own inertia... each interaction giving more energy to the force of the narrative flow. Those who like their books to each stand alone will be disappointed... as the first book in a Hamiltonian trilogy there are so many loose ends at the conclusion of the book that it hardly even has a climax. There is plenty of cool shit going on, but no thread of the story reached an end. This is no surprise to anyone who has read any of Hamilton's other work... he writes epic scale sci fi and he does it beautifully. For me, I wasn't disapointed by the end... only eager for the next tome.
Overall, I'd call this a promising introduction to the new trilogy, and an exciting expansion of the wonderful world he created in the previous books. I'm inordinately pleased to be looking forward again to another Hamilton novel to appear on the shelves... I was pretty bummed when I finished Judas and realized that it might be a while before I saw more from my favorite comtemporary SciFi writer.
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