Wednesday, March 20, 2002
Title: The Nights Dawn Trilogy
Author: Peter F. Hamilton
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
The Night's Dawn trilogy, which is made up by The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God, is a colossal undertaking - with each volume coming up to 1200 pages. Which allows for some amount of characters and plot complexity, while also being surprisingly gripping.
With the environmental decay of Earth people have had to seek refuge in great domes to protect them from the weather. At the same time resources have become scarce and the population is continuing to rocket, this was the impetus for further space exploration. Over the course of 7 centuries the human race has spread across the galaxy, building up a new kind of society and economy, which includes relations with alien species.
A new group of settlers arrive on a young colony, along with their group of prisoners (criminals deported as an involuntary workforce). This seems to be a new life for these people, hard work setting up villages and farms, but at last a release from the Earth's overcrowding. However things go wrong when some of the prisoners step out of line, with once incident accidentally opening a gateway which allows something to come through, something which takes over the human bodies and is extremely powerful. With no idea of how or why the planet soon finds that it has been invaded, and the enemy are quickly building to threaten the entire confederation that the Earth has worked so hard to build.
The Reality Dysfunction sets the scene, Peter F. Hamilton constructing a space opera of epic proportions, but one which is contemporary enough to fall into the category of hard science fiction as well. Over the course of the book as the threat spreads he manages to work in a real sense of tension and horror, introducing us to characters and building them for their fall while we watch. With the end of Dysfunction some of the truth of what is happening is becoming revealed, which opens up the way for The Neutronium Alchemist. The humans who have been taken over are referred to as the possessed and they are spreading across the universe, fighting with their extraordinary powers at every turn. With each turn things seem only to get worse, whole planets fall and vanish from the universe, while the nature of the possessed has changed the entire meaning of life. All sides struggle to regain a doomsday weapon - the Alchemist - in the hope that it will provide an advantage, a solution. Battles are being fought on every front, desperation for a solution continues to drive the confederation, leading to the search for The Naked God deep in uncharted space.
Hamilton fleshes out his future to an incredible degree, filled with ideas and the terminology to go with it. At the core a schism in the human race - Adamist versus Edenist - the churches are appalled by bitek (advanced bio-technology) and strive to ban it, while those that embrace it set up a new community (Eden) and set themselves up as the first new community of the future. Throughout we follow how various factions are dealing with the problems that beset them, from the political to the social. Along the way old conflicts must be resolved to form new alliances, we view action on the political front and on the covert as we continually discover new organisations and new interest groups. From the horror and tension that mounts with the spread of the problem in the first book Hamilton moves it so that we are less aware of that as an issue by the third book, confronted by big questions and elusive answers.
With a work of this scale and having set up such a threat we must become aware of one question as the trilogy continues - how is Hamilton going to pull it off? A solution to the problem must be found, or at least some sort of credible ending must be reached for all this work to have been worth it in the end. Through the books we find that other alien races have faced the equivalent problem in the past, with which each have faced it in a different manner, giving us insight into the different levels of society these races represent. The Kiint maintain that there are solutions from the start, but as a vastly superior race they have sworn themselves to non-involvement. So while they won't provide the solution it is with this aspect that we are helped to realise that there can be an answer. In the end the solution is extreme, final battles are culminating, lost battles are trying to recover, heroes and villains are set up - then the answer is presented and it is sweeping and dangerous. Dangerous for an author that is, a fine line between getting carried away - did he go to far or did the massive universe changing finale justify the scale of the tale being told? I suspect that for some the feel of what Hamilton is doing will not work - from the detail and cause throughout to this momentous conclusion. However if you get as far as the third volume then you are probably up for it, and with that the big ending is pulled off just on the satisfying side (it is a thin line after all).
RVWR: PTR
March 2002
