Peter F. Hamilton - Pandora's Star [and] Judas Unchained [The Commonwealth Duo]

The Night’s Dawn Trilogy was a powerful book with a number of flaws, and Hamilton seems determined to cart them all over to his new work. While he’s at it, though, he imports a few excellent traits as well. All in all, the Commonwealth Duo is half Mercedes and half car crash.

Making a thousand pieces work in tandem is an incredible feet, but it requires an excellent grasp of pacing to keep their integration smooth. The pacing in the Commonwealth Duo is, to put it bluntly, fucked. In fact, if it wasn’t for Hamilton’s ability to racket up almost unbearable levels of tension in only a few pages, I don’t think the stuttering, staggering, staccato flow would have left anything even remotely respectable.

Many authors are accused of utilizing dues ex machina endings or events to move the story forward. Peter F. Hamilton will never be one of the accused. He foreshadows everything, and I mean everything. If, in the last five pages of book two, Chris is going to hold the door for someone important, you can bet that you’re going to follow Chris’s life all through book one, seeing him kiss his wife and hug his kids for roughly the length of your average novel, all to prep him for his six lines in the spotlight.

Hamilton’s Commonwealth is a creation of incredible depth. Every single street corner has a history, every world a personality. Hamilton does not shy away from showing you that history. These are certainly not books that take place on an empty stage, but one could argue quite convincingly that they have the opposite problem. Hamilton’s world building comes in the flavor of info dumps upon entering a new area or location, the culmination of a long established plot thread briefly paused to chronicle a canal.

 It’s an inevitable fact of epics that various strands will lag behind, that you won’t be quite as captivated in one plot thread as another, but the problem is a hundred times compounded here. Were you enjoying that climactic space battle, where the enemy was bearing down through the shattered navy lines towards the defenseless characters you’ve spent so long growing acquainted to? Well, I hope not, because we’re now going to watch Ozzie build a raft. For thirty pages. Maybe, if you’re good, we’ll go back to something interesting later.

Remember the sex scenes in the Reality Dysfunction? Abundant, superfluous, overacted, etc? Remember how they then vanished in the Neutronium Alchemist and the Naked God? Ah, that was nice. Well, they’re back now. In force. There are advantages to how Hamilton handles sex in the Commonwealth Duo, I’ll admit. This time, we cut to black before whittling away pages in an orgasmic stagnation. Unfortunately, there is so much sex here that it simply blows the mind, and it’s all (or damn close to it) packed into one viewpoint. Mellanie has sex. A lot. With everyone. Look at the Dramatic Personae. Odds are, if you see a name there, Mellanie will have sex with them before the book ends.

All of which is to avoid mentioning the run on sentences which are, once again, everywhere. Does Hamilton not have an editor, or at the least a book of middle grade grammar, to inform him of the basics of sentence structure?

And yet, despite it all, the Commonwealth Duo is still most certainly half Mercedes. In fact, quite a bit better than half, because the bits that Hamilton is good at are really, really good. Really, really good enough, in fact, to counter the bits were he’s really, really bad.

The greatest strength and weakness of the worldbuilding, and the books as a whole, is its total lack of focus. Concepts that could guide whole novels are the backstories of a single character, explorations into deep space and naval warfare only a part of the action, murder mysteries and memory wipes nothing but the provider of some extra motivation, guerilla warfare on an alien planet a side story, galactic terrorists and conspiracies, subversive aliens, artificial intelligences, scheming politicians and clashing dynasties, it’s all just a part of the whole. And the whole of the Commonwealth Duo is, in every possible way, larger than life.

Hamilton has an unmatched gift for realizing setting. His creations are vast and deep, his universes populated by dozens of world that are each both logical and unique. Though it’s true that much of the information is more plopped in front of you than woven in, Hamilton is excellent at balancing the fantastic and the realistic in his worldbuilding, ending up with a product so unexpected that you can’t look away but so well woven in and explained that you can’t help but believe it.

This is not your generic, vanilla space opera setting. Hamilton’s world developed along its own track, with your standard spaceflight society being neatly sidestepped in the prologue. The Commonwealth proper does have spaceships, but it’s the trains and wormholes that are its true soul, and even the traditional elements of deep space war are treated in an interesting fashion here.

The locations outside of the Commonwealth are equally well done, for the most part. The alien’s late entrance is, oddly enough, one of their best assets. After so much time probing around the issue and so much speculation as to just what’s inside the barrier, the reader being shocked right alongside the characters. The Prime race is probably the strongest part of the novels, a species that is both convincingly alien and an excellent antagonist.

Then there’s Ozzy’s journey on the Silfen pathways. Now, I’ll give you that there are some very, very cool images here. But there’s a problem, and it’s that cool images are all that there is. There’s no tension whatsoever in Ozzy’s sections. None. There’s no excitement, no intrigue, not reason at all to stay interested once the constant barrage of bizarre locales has left you desensitized. And, just to add insult to injury, the payoff is entirely superfluous by the time it comes, and Ozzy’s actions afterwards are not juvenile but almost nauseatingly idealistic. The fact that Ozzy’s immature wanderings are artificially forced to amount to something serves only to devalue the actions of every other character in the series.

Still, Ozzy’s only one character, and the rest of the cast is well done and diverse. Though many characters initially seem unnecessary, you will, by the end, have grasped the importance of all of them, and the dozens of plot threads that course through these worlds tie into each other and drive by on adjacent tracks, each glimpse into Mark’s life lending credence to something unrelated that Mellanie sees two hundred pages later, with her every step factoring just as heavily into Myo’s investigations.

Every character isn’t particularly fleshed out, but Hamilton is adept at making the parts illuminate the whole, the individual blandness of many of the senators leading to an interesting picture when viewed in its aggregate, which isn’t to say that none of Hamilton’s characters are interesting when viewed on their own.

The most intriguing member of the cast by a landslide is Paula Myo. She’s an archetype driven far past its standard borders until it becomes interesting again. Genetically engineered to be the perfect police officer, Myo’s as dedicated as she is ruthless, as honest as she is meticulous.

Unsurprisingly for a mechanism with so many components, the Commonwealth Duo takes some time to get started. The opening of Pandora’s Star, for a brief time, belies this. You’ve got one or two main plot lines, and it’s easy for a bit to imagine the exploratory craft departing, the killer being caught, and everything wrapping up nice and neat in time for the carefully choreographed galactic war.

That’s not quite how it plays out.  Events and plot threads soon spiral out of control, the simplest problem soon growing a half dozen corollaries and popping out a few new activists, every seemingly solitary character greeted with the full weight of the Commonwealth’s interplanetary population. Even the beginnings of the end, the potential death tone of their civilization, can’t unite the citizens of the Commonwealth, and it seems impossible at the end of the first half of the series to imagine a satisfying resolution.

The majority of Judas Unchained, however, is anything but undisciplined. The number of plot threads is truly prodigious at this point, yes, but Hamilton wields them dexterously, building them up into their own climaxes and developments without, generally, sacrificing too much mobility on the part of their counterparts. I’d say that this part right here, the first five hundred odd pages of Judas Unchained, is the best part of the series – though the initial Prime perspective in Pandroa’s Star is the undisputed best scene – and it’s, suddenly, easy to imagine an incredibly satisfying ending. Not what that ending is, mind you, there are far too many moving parts to even start to picture what the configuration’ll be when they all stop, but you’re sure, by now, that Hamilton’s got something grand planned.

He does, sort of. But it takes far too long to really kick itself into action. The climax of Judas Unchained is protracted and, far worse, unable to maintain the same gravity that the buildup had in such great supply. What was once an epic struggle as now a cheesy adventure – complete with a prostitute tagging along for cliché’s sake – and what was once a painful moral decision is now a cheesy fight the man! whine.

Is the Commonwealth Duo a travesty of excess or landmark of Space Opera? Well, truth to tell, it’s a bit of both. There’s very little middle of the road in Hamilton’s writing; it’s a project with both absurd highs and painful lows all mashed into one. Is it worth reading? Hell yes. Is it worth loving? Yeah, I think it is. Is it worth hating? Yup, that too.

Reading in October

Generally a good month, starting some interesting series and wrapping up some others, as well as quite a few collections and stand alones. No Breaking New Ground books this time around, but I haven't abandoned those and will fit in some more next month.


Daniel Abraham is fast becoming, in my opinion, the ultimate unsung hero of epic fantasy. Tor never published a paperback version of The Price of Spring, and yet The Long Price was a series almost unmatched for its decisive pacing and marvelous, evolving characterization. Leviathan Wept, a collection of Abraham’s short fiction, lives up to the lofty expectations any reader of his previous work no doubt has. Review coming.


Close this tab. I’ve heard that Barker – close this tab – is a master of horror for years, and this (closethistab) is the first work of his that I’ve read. I’m closethistab more confused than awed, though. As far as I can tell shutoffyourbrowser this is a fairly standard, meandering and unexciting novel, albeit occasionally an amusing one, that’s rendered almost unbearable by the book’s nonstop begging (don’t read the rest) for you to put it down, putting you in the mood to do nothing so much as throw the book at the wall and yell (one last chance, close this tab): Alright, Mr. Barker, I think I will!


Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell is a beautifully written novel. It’s more than a little meander happy, but excellent nonetheless. This is one of the very rare books that I can seriously call delightful every time I open it up. Not perfect, no, but dazzling enough to make up for that.


The Passage, at least in terms of marketing, seems like this year’s big novel. I did enjoy it, but I didn’t love it. Review coming.


My first Sherlock Holmes story is a success. Despite some pacing problems, I’m already looking forward to reading more of Doyle’s stories. Review coming.


The Halfmade World ran roughshod over my expectations. I was expecting good, very good even, and it delivered great. Comparing The Halfmade World to Thunderer is like comparing night and day. And that’s coming from someone who really liked Thunderer. Review coming.


I really, really love some aspects of Hamilton’s writing. And I really, really hate some other aspects. Judas Unchained seems to have magnified just about every good and bad tendency of its creators, and my opinion is mixed, though I did enjoy the read. Review of it and Pandora’s Star coming.


I always find M.R. James’s writing to be engrossing, but the reason isn’t the scare factor. There is something about James’s style, part formal antique and part colloquial, that makes me feel like the man is sitting across from me, telling me his experiences first hand. That isn’t, by the way, to suggest that these stories are tame. There are a few that the reader desensitized by the loudness and often excessiveness of modern horror will, sadly, find a bit hard to feel the horror of (I think the modern standard is for the doll’s to brutally murder at least three people; wood replaying old tragedies in the night simply isn’t bloody enough), but there are no weak stories here…

Except for the first tale in the collection, The Residence at Whitminister, which, for some reason, I found almost impenetrable. I’m not sure if this is a result of James’s writing or simply me being unused to his style after a long hiatus, but a reread did not solve the problem, and I’m left with a collection of out of order facts and occurrences without the slightest emotional thread to tie them together.


Newton’s debut is ambitious, well written, and not without the occasional flaw. Review here.


I loved The Folding Knife, and I went into The Engineer Trilogy with very, very high expectations. Devices and Desires is very good, and has quite a few very interesting elements, but it also has a few aspects that I’m more hesitant upon. All the same, I’m looking forward to starting Evil for Evil in a few days. Review coming when I finish the trilogy.

Reading in July

When it comes to quantity, July was a disappointing month. Hopefully, though, the quality and complexity of some of the reads that were done will excuse that. I think more of the problem, though, is that I rediscovered the idea of reading more than one book at once – and then remembered why I stopped doing it. Starting seven books means finishing none, which is why, though I’ve read more than a hundred pages of Jonathan strange and Mr Norrell, Fragile Things, The Space Opera Renaissance, The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, The Third Bear, The Inferno, and Dust of Dreams, I can’t say that I’ve finished any of them. Ah well, I suppose that I’ll have to focus a bit more next month.


Rereading the first Gaiman novel that I ever read – about which I was ambivalent about at the time – has led to a similar analysis of it, just with the positives massively magnified and the negatives rendered almost insignificant. I’ll be talking about this book at length in the future, so I’ll leave the rest until then.


After the Night’s Dawn trilogy, I was expecting incredible things from the rest of Hamilton’s bibliography. Pandora’s Star had parts that lived up to my expectations – Paula Myo and her battle against the Guardians, the aliens themselves, the novel’s conclusion – but there were just as many parts that dragged horribly, and the pacing seemed determined to let the latter category ruin the former. Were you enjoying that nail biting space battle? I hope not, because we’re now going to make a boat for the next fifty pages.


Though I’m still unsure as to whether Blood Meridian was horribly, brilliantly, depressingly brutal, or just horribly, brilliantly, brutally depressing, I am pretty sure that this is a book that deserves the accolades that it receives. That being said, the pointless, repetitive nature of the violence that was the book’s greatest strength was also its flaw, as the opening third-or-so felt aimless and failed to captivate me. Only when the Kid properly joins Glanton, and the Judge comes to the fore, did the story come alive in my eyes.


It says something about a book, though I’m not sure if that something’s good or bad, when, two weeks after finishing it, you’re still not sure if you enjoyed it. Parts of Gravity’s Rainbow were nothing short of revelatory, while others were exercises in willpower to slug through and felt like a mountain of bloated excess. Still, in the end, I’m glad that I tackled this one, even if my perceptions still need a bit more sorting out.

Peter F. Hamilton - Night's Dawn [Trilogy Review]

Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn books immediately set themselves apart on any bookshelf. How, you ask? Simple. It’s by being twice the size of anything else on the shelf. That size is what dictates pretty much element of the trilogy, from plot, to characters, to structure, to the writing itself. These books are not gigantic by accident. Rather, their space is used deliberately to create an effect that would be impossible in a more focused volume. In an article on the writing of The Night’s Dawn trilogy, Hamilton says:

The example I always give is The Battle Of Britain. A conflict which saw the warrior heroes of both countries battling it out for supremacy in the most sophisticated technology of the era. Theirs is a fantastic story, full of heroism and struggle and sacrifice. All very well, but there were hundreds of thousands of people who lived underneath the dogfights in the sky, whose lives were going to undergo monumental change because of the conflict (whoever won). Ultimately what happens to them i.e. society as a whole, is more interesting.

Nominally, the Night’s Dawn trilogy is about a mysterious disaster originating on Lalaonde and threatening the entire Confederation. In reality, though, Hamilton’s goal is to create a believable society and then show every effect of that disaster, both physical and moral, on his creation. As a result, this is a very decentralized story, where the number of point of views spreads throughout the entire Confederation, staying just half a step ahead of the waves of change and destruction. The best way to understand these books is to imagine a massive glass creation, gigantic but every inch carefully devised and filled with details, and then to imagine the inexorable destruction of the sculpture, inch by inch, the cracks spreading so slowly as to be visual but so quickly as to be unstoppable. It’s an effect that would only be meaningful if the reader first understands every intricacy of Hamilton’s creation, and so Hamilton shows us exactly that.

Imagine, for a second, that there are three layers to every story. The first layer is the present time, the plot, if you will. Just about every author will explicitly show this, because it is, presumably, why we’ve come. The second layer is the backstory, how the characters got where they are, who the characters are, etc. This is generally implied, though the degree to which it is shown depends on the author. Finally, we’ve got the layer behind even the backstory, what’s simply the background. This is stuff like the minutia of the justice system, or how planet X was settled, why coalition Y makes this product, etc. it’s the kind of thing that’s important for an author know, but it’s rare for the readers to ever learn – or care – about much of it.

Hamilton doesn’t follow that template. Instead, he shows you the first and second layers in their entirety. We are not dropped into a fully functional colony on Lalonde. Instead, we build the colony with our own two hands and watch every single event that occurs upon its path. The third layer, too, makes its way into the books, primarily the first, in the form of expository infodumps. These can get a tad excessive at times, but are usually interesting enough to make up for that.

The trilogy opens with The Reality Dysfunction. This volume bears the brunt of the exposition that’s so central to the tale, and, as a result, the beginning is very hard to get into. Right off the bat, we’re introduced to three point of views, and we alternate between them for the first third or so of the novel. At first, this structure is a bit self defeating. None of the three plot lines are boring, but none of them are right off the bat spellbinding, either, and the vast number of intervening pages (Hamilton writes huge chapters) between one appearance and the next seem geared to kill all momentum.

The interesting thing about these early threads is that they’re as close to slice of life as you can get in a space opera. That’s not to imply that they’re pedestrian or mundane, but rather to say that, no matter how interesting the events that take place are, they’re generally par for the course for the world. The result of this is that, when things finally do go out of hand, the reader can feel how wrong it is without being told. Joshua’s attempts to circumvent standard business practices and make huge amounts of cash, but, crucially, still playing within the system (just in a new and inventive way), serve to indoctrinate us into Hamilton’s Confederation. By the time the ground rules start to change, we’re at least as capable of pointing out the changes as any of Hamilton’s characters, having received lessons in every aspect of the worldbuilding from Joshua, Syrinx, and the various Lalonde pilgrims.

Hamilton’s characterization is always adequate, but only occasionally notable. In a cast of this size, it’s absolutely vital for each character to be distinctive enough for the reader to be able to recognize them when they pop up, and know who they are, and at this Hamilton has no problems. With main characters, appearing again and again over a span of pages this massive, however, the reader expects to see some growth. In this regard, Joshua is by far the best character of the series. Though his is not the kind of evolution you’re going to be analyzing in essays, his arc is believable and consistent throughout. Syrinx, too, is passable, though – and especially in this novel – she can occasionally be too idealistic at times.

Oddly enough, though, it’s when discussing groups that Hamilton’s skills with people come to the fore. Though there were few individual characters in the trilogy that I would’ve been devastated to lose, there were several locations that I developed a strong bond with. In this, I think it’s Hamilton’s sense of scale, and ability to convincing juggle night on countless viewpoints, that carries the day. Though there’s no one colonist on Lalonde that you particularly care about, the colony itself feels like something you built with your own sweat and blood, a place where you are on congenial terms with all of your neighbors and nod happily to everyone, and the threat of its destruction evokes an emotional response that’s far greater than the collective death of its citizens can account for. Easily eclipsing Lalonde in this regard, Tranquility, especially in the later books, becomes a symbol of hope, a message that the spreading disaster makes a happy life difficult but by no means impossible, and that message effects the reader to the same degree that it effects the characters.

Something that has to be mentioned when discussing The Reality Dysfunction, especially Joshua’s storyline, is the sheer amount of sex in it. Now, I’m not arguing that something like this can never be appropriate, but Hamilton exceeds any sane measure of excess. Any meaningful relationship is all but drowned out in a sea of orgasmic white noise. Furthermore, the sex scenes never come across to the reader as anything but a chore to get through. The characters, in their absurd over-enjoyment of every act, create an impenetrable barrier of quadruple orgasms that the reader has no hope of penetrating, in the manner of an actor overacting to a degree that we just see the performance, not the material, leaving us feeling more like an uncomfortable voyeur than a participator. Thankfully, Hamilton seems to have been aware of the problem, because the number of sex scenes drops off faster than you would believe in book two.

The sex isn’t the only unpolished aspect of book one. Though Hamilton’s writing throughout the series is never exemplary, it’s never trying to be. It gets the job done fine, paints a clear picture, and brings you to a swift understanding of the incredibly complex world that Hamilton’s created. In the first book, however, comma splices appear in what feels like every other sentence. Let’s turn to a random page, 126. Most of the way down, we get: The food they had been served was strange, the aboriginal fruit was all odd shapes with a mildly spicy flavoring but at least there wasn’t any vat meat like they had at the arcology. Now, I’ll admit it’s an incredibly small complaint in the grand scheme of things, but the mistake’s endless appearances become more than a tad annoying as the book goes on.

As I’ve said, The Reality Dysfunction’s pacing is iffy at best for the first third of the book. At that point, however, Hamilton kicks things into high gear. Things begin to come together, both large and small, and various plot threads slowly begin to coalesce, while Hamilton throws more and more into the already overflowing pot. The book becomes something akin to a runaway truck. At some point, any sane person would think, something has to give. But it doesn’t. Impossibly, the pace picks up and up until it’s hard to stop reading for long enough to turn the page, until the urgency is almost painful.

That’s not to say that the book becomes mindless action, however. Far from it. Though Hamilton is excellent at military skirmishes and combat in general, it is the weight of the world building and the density of the atmosphere that makes the book so incredible. The disaster on Lalonde isn’t revealed in one go, nothing even remotely like that, and the initial encounters are absolutely terrifying in a way that even dedicated horror fiction seldom manages.

This works precisely because of the lengthy build up. That sense of wonder that we all love so much is actually layered. There is the initial shock of immersing oneself in another world, but by the time you get up to the actual disaster, you’re thinking like an inhabitant. That, however, is just in time to be absolutely blindsided, alongside every character, by what’s suddenly emerging. The double effect is, needless to say, incredibly powerful.

[The exact nature of the disaster, revealed partway through the Reality Dysfunction, is a key component of the series. Since I don’t wish to spoil it for anyone, but cannot proceed without revealing it, be warned that the rest of this review has SPOILERS for book one. Then again, most reviews I’ve read spoil it anyway, so…]

The central conceit of the Night’s Dawn Trilogy is the dead returning as possessors. It would have been incredibly easy for the idea of possession to devolve into silliness, especially once famous people begin to start popping up, but, barring a few mishaps, Hamilton treats his ideas seriously enough to not rob them of their power. Crucial to this is his decision to not rob them of their humanity:

“Do you think [Hitler] changed after he died, Mr. Halahan? Do you think he lost his conviction or his righteousness? Do you think death causes you to look back on life and make you realize what an ass you’ve been? Oh no, not that, Mr. Halahan. You’re too buys screaming, you’re too buys cursing, you’re too busy coveting your neighbor’s memory for the bitter dregs of taste and colour it gives you. Death does not bestow window, Mr. Halahan. It does not make you humble before the Lord. More’s the pity."

As the series progresses, and as more and more possessed get their own viewpoints, the conflict turns from one of horror to one of military action and moral consequences. Hamilton brings back Al Capone to lead the possessed Organization, and his conflicts – both with other possessed and with the government at large – are well done and gripping, featuring several very clever ideas.

The main theme of the series is that, helpful as it is, technology doesn’t hold all the answers. As a result, the people of Hamilton’s future are very much the people of our present. There is no easy solution here, whether it is to be found by magic or brute force. In order to progress, society is going to actually have to face – and fix – its problems. The implementation of these themes is somewhat mixed. Hamilton has no problem with weaving these ideas into the story. The ground war begun in book three, for instance, does an excellent job of showing the impossibility of any kind of military solution.

What isn’t so interwoven is the Neutronium Alchemist sub plot. Now, by itself, this would be okay. Even effective. What isn’t so okay is that this sub plot takes up an incredible amount of space. Someone would be forgiven for thinking that something that comes up in the second chapter and easily has several hundred pages (a decent novel’s space, mind you) devoted to it would turn out to matter for more than reproving an already understood point.

Equally disparate from the rest of the narrative, but far more effective, are the sub plots – beginning in The Neutronium Alchemist but coming into their fore in the final volume – that show the possessed’s attempts at creating a utopian society. As it turns out, magic’s no more helpful than nanotechnology when it comes to correcting basic human flaws, and the possessed, who are, first and foremost, people, and their attempts to deal with reality once again formed some of my favorite parts of the whole trilogy.

Despite all these issues, The Neutronium Alchemist is the best paced book in the trilogy. Though the number of threads is even larger than in The Reality Dysfunction, Hamilton focuses on one thread at a time – though not to the total exclusion of the others – until it reaches a climax of sorts. As a result, though there is a truly incredible amount of ground covered in this volume, it never feels scattershot, and we’re able to get closely involved in each struggle as it comes up.

The Naked God, by contrast, returns to an exacerbated version of the flaws that were so prevalent in the first book’s structure. Once again, we’re seeing events through several hard to connect plot threads, and since the number only swells as the series progressed, the amount of different side stories is truly unwieldy by this point.

That’s not to imply that the book doesn’t work, however. The various sub plots are some of the strongest of the series, even if they rarely gel all that well (and occasionally get lost in the shuffle).The most out there plot is definitely the battle for Earth’s arcologies. The concept is interesting, and the deliberations and actions of B-7 formed some of my favorite parts of the series, but none of the events here felt like part of the main story. Part of the problem is Louise, because the pacing grinds to a dead stop every time she walked on stage. Worse, however, is Quinn, who is the only character that manages to get shallower with each book that passes and is, by this point, a painful caricature of his early self. Which, mind you, wasn’t exactly a paragon of in-depth characterization.

After over a million words, you’re expecting some serious payoff. Something that will BLOW YOUR MIND as far as endings go. For books one and two, after all, Hamilton certainly showed himself to be no slouch with endings. The Reality Dysfunction ends with a huge battle, some character development, and a relatively decent amount of closure (or, at least, a you-can-take-a-breather-here moment). The Neutronium Alchemist does nothing of the sort, ending on a cliffhanger, but it’s a well done cliffhanger that I can’t really blame him for, despite how much I may have ranted about it in the past.

The ending of The Naked God, however, is absolutely unforgivable. Now, Wert’s argued ad nauseam about why it’s not a deus ex machina, and I’ll give it to him. That doesn’t mean it isn’t one of the most anticlimactic endings I’ve ever read, however. Imagine, for a second, that Robert Jordan went so far as to have titled the final book in The Wheel of Time: The Dark One Kills Himself. Would that have made his purposeless suicide any more entertaining to read about? If not, you’re probably going to hate this ending. Essentially, had all but one character in The Naked God sat around twiddling their thumbs, humanity would’ve still come out just fine.

The Night’s Dawn trilogy has quite a few problems, not the least of which is the sheer number of sub plots, many of which are either extraneous or just plain not as good, that clog it up. None of that changes what it is at its core, however, and that is one of the most explosive and wide screen science fiction stories ever conceived of. Hamilton’s creation is both majestic and impossible to put down. If you’re a fan of the genre, you need to pick this up without question.

FURTHER READING

Wert’s reviews of the trilogy (Reality Dysfunction, Neutronium Alchemist, Naked God) should give you a good grip of what the trilogies all about. Peter F. Hamilton’s website also has an extensive question and answer that’s extremely interesting, though also as spoiler filled as it’s possible to get.

Reading in June

I was really looking forward to Donaldson’s Gap series, which seemed poised to deliver everything I was thirsting after in a space opera. The opening volume of the series, The Real Story, was something that I’d heard described as an exercise in slowly shifting the reader’s perceptions of the characters from villain to hero and vice versa. From that angle, it was a huge success. From a general reading angle, however, I had quite a few problems with the story. More information in the upcoming review.

There are times when I regret putting up every book I read. Those times are not when I read something really stupid, such as Pog Decides to Climb Mount Everest, because those are fun in a look-what-an-idiot-I-am way. Something like Crime and Punishment (or, later in this very article, Hamlet), however, is a far more awkward proposition. What the hell am I going to say about a novel that has been often proclaimed the best novel of all time? In this case, I suppose I could say that, though I don’t know if I can name it the single greatest, it’s certainly up there, but I’m not exactly being original there, am I? I suppose I could mumble briefly about the horrible believability of Raskalnikov’s decline, the heart wrenching character of Sonya, and all of that, but, really, this is something that you probably don’t need my recommendation for.

Somehow Form a Family is a collection of personal essays from the author of Here We Are In Paradise, Jim the Boy, etc. while I wasn’t as engrossed as I was while reading Earley’s fiction, I still enjoyed his writing throughout the volume.

I’ve always been having a bit of trouble spotting the decline that’s supposedly been upon Malazan for quite some time. Now, having read the supposed nadir of the series, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just an atypical Malazan fan, because Toll the Hounds blew me away. From a plot standpoint, it’s hard to argue that it’s a particularly good novel, being primarily concerned with fragmentary tangents and only coalescing after quite a bit of pages have passed, but the excellent prose and – yes, I’m going to say it – wisdom of Erikson’s words (I have a full three thousand words of quotes from the novel, which is, needless to say, slightly above the average) make up for that and then some.

Anansi Boys was a lightning fast read that made the tiring business of air travel go by in a flash. Like Neverwhere, the easiness of the read belies the power of its themes and the depths of the characterization found here. I’ve got to admit it: Gaiman is just as good as everyone says he is, and I can’t wait to get into more of his work.

Though undeniably the most bloated of the trilogy, The Naked God had me enthralled right up until the end. Which was even worse than I’d expected. All of which will be, of course, elaborated on in my review on Tuesday.

Hutton has a great sense of the rhythms and flow of speech, but I ran into problems with the play when, after the first act, I wanted to slap both of the characters, one for being pedantic and arrogant, the other for being…well, just arrogant. That combined with the hard to understand, and harder to forgive, colossal mishearing in the final act caused Last Train to Nibroc to not work for me, though it would, I don’t doubt, be different when performed.

I had high expectations for Banquet for the Damned after reading Apartment 16, and I’m glad to say that it lived up to them. Nevill’s debut is a balanced blend of classic and modern horror, with the strengths of both well intact. My review of the novel is forthcoming.

As I said when discussing Crime and Punishment, I just don’t think there’s much I can add here in the way of insight that hasn’t been said before, so I’m not really going to try. On a personal level, this was a bit of a revelation, as I can finally see why Shakespeare is so revered. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, but Hamlet feels like it’s on another level entirely from both of those.

Reading in May

This collection felt like being handed a treasure map. Suddenly, I know just where I’m going when exploring this bizarre sub genre. Yes, not all of the stories worked entirely – Kathe Koja’s, for instance, was too bizarre and irrational for me to get any emotional connection with at all – but the ones that did drastically outweighed the others, and even the not-so-great stories are never trite or boring. If you’re interested in The New Weird, and somehow have not read this yet, it’s absolutely essential.


This was a very interesting biography-esque book, primarily consisting of letters to and from Bulgakov. My only complaint is that the summaries at the beginning of each chapter (detailing the overall events of his life, so as to give the letters some context) could probably have benefited from being spread throughout, rather than lumped at the beginning, as it felt odd in some of the lengthier chapters to go from reading about Bulgakov’s death say, to reading a letter he wrote four years earlier about his dinner plans. Still, if you’re interested in Bulgakov, this’ll shed quite a bit of personal and professional light on the man.


Almost every story in this collection is about finding subtle holes in our understandings of the world, in deconstructing almost every kind of happiness that people find for themselves. That’s not to paint this as a wholly grim work, though, because the beauties of the work come from those same interactions and observations. If I was to compare the writing to any one author, I’d probably go with Stephen King, as odd as that sounds. The stories here, like in King’s work, are not based on forward motion, but rather a flashback and musing filled contemplation of a man’s life, or at least a part of it. This is a quiet work, but an interesting one too.


Though no one part of The Neutronium Alchemist is as jaw dropping as the what’sgoingon!? segment of the Reality Dysfunction, the book as a whole is much stronger, with most of the issues I had with the first book ironed out. Well, except its own infuriating cliffhanger ending. Still, these books are the epitome of wide screen space opera, as far as I can tell, and I can’t wait to dive into The Naked God. Review coming when I’ve finished the series.


20th Century Ghosts is at once exactly what a horror collection should be (disturbing, supernatural, even morbid on occasion), perfectly aware of every one of your expectations (Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead works precisely because it’s nothing like what you expect), and something completely different (such as the touching Pop Art, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read). If you’re interested in horror, you need to read this as soon as possible. I’ll definitely be returning to these stories on here, though I’ll need some time to gather my thoughts, I expect.

[Note: At the time of writing I still have not read My Father’s Mask, so, technically, I haven’t finished the book. All the same, I’m going to finish the collection by tomorrow (so still May) without a doubt, and I’m unsure about the status of my internet then, so I figured it was better to go through with a blank than to procrastinate and miss the end of the month.]


The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon seems, at first, like it’ll be an excellent novel. The young girl’s voice is perfect, and the minutia of her struggle to survive, lost, in the woods is gripping. Then the supernatural comes in and – who’s surprised? – it all goes to hell. Not the hell of fire and brimstone, but rather one of wholly absent tension and dues ex machine. Yay. Full review coming at some point.


Apartment 16’s a character driven horror story, and as such it’s a good thing that the characterization’s generally excellent, and the walls positively drip with atmosphere. There are a few problems herein – the ending was a bit of a letdown, Apryl’s character isn’t as captivating as Seth’s, and god do I hate that Y in Apryl – but none of them really matter when stacked up against the work as a whole. Review coming soon.


The first quarter or so of this book was fairly difficult, to be honest. It’s fairly standard in fantasy to have a period of disorientation – nothing makes the world seem quite so exotic and strange as being clueless about it, after all – but here that period goes on for well over a hundred pages, and it starts to get quite annoying. Still, the book does eventually come together. The writing is, as you would expect from Mieville, excellent, and the narrative’s incredibly fun. This isn’t my favorite of his works, but it’s certainly not a disappointment.


This book of essays turned out to not be my thing. At all. Individual portions of essays were appealing – the book had two quote-worthy passages, which was quite impressive for a volume of only 139 pages – but every single one of the essays felt meandering and disjointed, an effect that was only exacerbated if the reader reads more than one in a sitting. Before long, all the boundaries between them break down, whatever hard-to-detect main ideas there might have been long lost, and you’re just drifting along on an endless small-wonders ramble.


Swainston’s novel was one that I was quite looking forward to, and it didn’t disappoint. The Year of Our War is a bizarre, character driven story that looks into immortality and how societies – and people – progress over time. My full review is here.

The Anatomy of a Doorstopper (The Neutronium Alchemist)

Your average book has, one hopes, carefully determined pacing. After a certain point, though, the author’s best efforts to guide my reading speed invariably fail. When the requisite weight is reached, the sheer number of pages in one of our beloved genre’s many doorstoppers simply outmuscles whatever pace the author was trying to set.

I have a pattern for these doorstoppers, and it seems fairly consistent. The first two or so days are pretty much like with any other book. You usually have more exposition in the opening of a one thousand page epic fantasy than in a three hundred page one, but it doesn’t change up my reading experience all that much.

It’s around the third day when problems start to set in. By this point I’ve usually read around three or four hundred pages. Now, if I’m reading an average book – and I’d say that the average book in my collection is probably between four and five hundred, though I’m not really basing that number off of anything – I’m drawing to the close. If the author’s done their job, I’m probably itching to see how everything ties together. If I’m reading Steven Erikson’s Reaper’s Gale, however, I’m a third of the way through. That’s about when the realization that I’m nowhere near the end sets in, and it occurs to me that I could probably read at least two other books in the time it’s taking me to go through Reaper’s Gale, or any other similarly sized behemoth. The knowledge that, were I to sit down and read for five hours straight, I still wouldn’t be even close to the end is frankly demoralizing, and it’s about here that my pace always flag.

But, of course, reading giant books isn’t an exercise in tedium, because I probably wouldn’t read so many if it was. Once I hit the halfway mark I start speeding up, the momentum I’ve been slowly gaining finally coming into play. By the time I hit page five or six hundred of a thousand page book, my speed starts increasing exponentially. I’ll often find myself reading the last three hundred pages of an epic in a day, because the agony of delayed gratification and slowly building tension has simply become too much.

Then, of course, there’s the comedown. This period is frequently so extreme that looking at any book under five hundred or six hundred pages feels like trying to dam a river with a skateboard, or trying to end a famine with a cracker. Almost always, I’ll start the next book in the series immediately after, providing there is one, because by this point I’m like a runaway train, and I’ll be damned if running out of pages is going to stop me. Of course, I usually realize what I’ve done about fifty pages into the new book, such as when I started Reaper’s Gale twenty minutes after finishing The Bonehunters, and put down the new one in a hurry before I’m too immersed to prevent the process from repeating itself all over again.

All of this brings us (finally) to Peter F. Hamilton’s Neutronium Alchemist. This book – at 1137 pages it’s a doorstopper if I ever saw one – started out by going through all the usual steps. The beginning was slightly slower because I was sick at the time, but, then again, the first scenes were genuinely excellent. Then I lagged for a bit, but as of Monday – and page 498 – I kicked things into high gear. Halfway through the book, I give in to the inevitable and admit to myself that I see why Peter F. Hamilton is considered such a master of science fiction.

Then comes Wednesday, and, by this point, I’m hopelessly hooked. I go from page 802 to page 1137, feeling like every moment not spent reading was utterly wasted. I barreled through the climax in a sitting, my jaw stuck somewhere between the floorboards. And then I turn page 1137 and…

that’s it?

No, there’s a mistake somewhere in here. I try turning the page again, but it doesn’t work. I try turning past the author bio, thinking that they might’ve shoved it somewhere in the middle of the last chapter, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Around this point it finally dawned on me: Hamilton ended a thousand page book with a cliffhanger. My gradual jog-cum-crazed-sprint had ended with me falling off a god damn cliff.

Mr. Hamilton, I love your books. As we speak, I’m shaking a little from withdrawal and looking out the window on the off chance that the post man’s bringing it to the box now, unlikely as that may be. All the same, I think that anyone who could possibly write a book that good and then not end it must be a truly terrible person.

[Note: The Neutronium Alchemist cover is the upcoming Subterranean Press edition, posted over at Walker of Worlds.]

Reading in April

Absolutely mind-blowing. The Master and Margarita is the kind of book that is both hilarious and disturbing, and it has enough layers that every time you reread a passage something else jumps out at you. All that being said, I’m more than a little hesitant about doing a review. First of all, this is (rightly) a classic; if I butchered the review I’d be quite pissed at myself. Then there’s the fact that I’m writing a research paper on the novel, so I’m unsure if I’ll be in the mood to do more writing on it after that. Until I make up my mind, this website has some very interesting information on the novel.


When I read American Gods, I found it interesting but slow to the point that I had trouble sticking with it. When I finished it, I decided to not read any more books by Gaiman. As time passed, however, I kept thinking about American Gods. It took me a while, but I finally gave Gaiman another chance…and I’ll admit it I was a hundred percent wrong about him. Neverwhere is both incredibly fun and quite touching at parts. Aidan's reveiw is here; my review will be up on Tuesday. UPDATE: my review will be delayed for a bit, though it is still coming.


I may not be the intended audience for Wit, seeing as my entire experience with Donne’s poetry consists of one poem read immediately before the play and the one sonnet quoted in full within the play. As for the play itself, I’m rather mixed. The main character’s dilemma is interesting, but I had trouble with the endless scenes that were, essentially, descriptions of medical procedures. I understand that they were necessary to some extent, and most did try and liven things up, but after a point the wit and meaning of some parts seemed to drown in scans and their ilk. Of course, all of that is likely quite different performed on stage.


For the first thousand pages, Return of the Crimson Guard had me convinced that Esslemont was, without a doubt, in the same league as Erikson. And then it all goes to hell. If you’ve read the book, you can see precisely why I despised the ending on Westeros. If not, suffice to say that a brilliant schemer turns out to be an idiot and an idiot turns out to be…well, still an idiot, but everyone’s convinced that he’s some sort of genius. If you want more information, Pat’s review is quite informative.


When I first started Hat Rack, I read Hamilton’s Fallen Dragon because I was too intimidated to jump in with this trilogy. For the first three hundred pages, The Reality Dysfunction felt like everything I’d feared. The three main plotlines were interesting, but the sheer scope of it prevented everything from fitting wholly together. Then everything clicked, and by page four hundred I couldn’t put this down. I’ll probably write my review once I’ve finished the trilogy, but in the meantime there’s Wert’s review to give you a good idea of the contents and strengths of the book, as well as my post on Westeros from immediately after my reading.


This is the slight outlier on the list, I think. I found this around the house and was actually somewhat curious about how my second oldest reading memories would hold up. (My first were for a book that I took out so many times that librarians said I couldn’t have it anymore, and I don’t even remember the title or author anymore. Damn those librarians!) The answer is…well, I’m not really sure. The book’s kind of amusing, I guess, if in a somewhat painful way. In the end, how can you not root for a pig-esque dude who climbs Mount Everest for the hell of it?


Watchmen taught me a fairly obvious lesson: never discount something just because of the medium. Watchmen is, without a doubt, one of the bleakest things that I’ve read, and the detail that went into the setting is amazing. Of course, the actual mechanics of the ending could’ve been a bit better (a…giant alien squid? C’mon.), but it wasn’t enough to ruin the impact of the story. After taking a bit of time to get used to reading graphic novels (something I’m going to definitely try and do more of, now) Watchmen paid off in spades. If you’ve already read it, you may be interested in Writing Excuse’s “critical reading” podcast on the book. In addition, there's a compilation of other Watchmen-related stuff here.


Anubis Gates was fast paced, filled with great action, and great twists. All that being said, it occasionally got to feel like a tad too much. I read the first half of the book or so in a sitting, but after that the amount that everyone could run in place before getting anywhere began to grate a bit. This is especially prominent when the book’s penultimate battle, ending with the death of a major villain, felt noticeably less climactic than several earlier, entertaining but ultimately pointless, bouts to the degree that I actually only realized it was supposed to be the climax when it, well, ended. Still, Anubis Gates is more than deserving of its reputation; this book contains amounts of sheer fun to rival just about anything else you’re likely to ever find.


I found Fall of Hyperion to be just as ambitious as Hyperion, but not as successful in living up to those ambitions. That’s not say that it’s a bad book, however; Fall of Hyperion still manages to combine fast paced space opera and somber passages on the lives of romantic poets, and that’s a damn fine accomplishment, even if the execution’s a bit marred. Full review here.


As I said back in my beginning-of-the-month post, I bought Tome of the Undergates primarily for Sam Sykes’s personality in interviews and on his blog than because the blurb drew me in. To some degree, Sykes does incorporate the questions he raised in interviews into the novel, but it wasn’t enough to save the book. My full review is here.