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From the product description: Too big to fit in this space! In the far future, humanity has divided along a single major line. The Edenists are genetically engineered space-dwellers with telepathic affinity to their biotechnological homes and ships. Adamists are effectively the Luddites of the future, willing to pioneer new worlds much as their ancestors did hundreds of years previously. The two clash on a primitive world called Lalonde, involving a huge cast of characters including a beautiful teenage girl who has inherited a vast technological empire; a freebooting adventurer in search of alien treasure; a renegade Edenist criminal; an alien race which observes human behavior; an ineffectual priest shocked by the world he has come to settle . . . and many, many more. |
The Night's Dawn Trilogy composes a whopping massive mind-bending six volumes:
If you decide to read this thing, you're going to have your work cut out for you, because for the most part, each volume of the series is HUGE!
The Night's Dawn trilogy defines what it means to be a space opera. It's huge, has a zillion characters, big concepts, and occurs on an epic scale. This can be a little bit intimidating trying to keep track of all the characters, planets, habitats, and societies. What somebody really needs to do is to write a companion book that would serve as a guide to the whole thing.... Wait! Hamilton even did that, it's called The Confederation Handbook. Personally, I haven't read the 'handbook' (I've heard from some other readers that it can spoil the plot), but if you start feeling overwhelmed, it might be a useful companion.
Anyhow, on to the story....
The first volume (The Reality Dysfunction: Emergence) is in my opinion, mostly background material. The story is a little bit slow to get started, but you just have to have patience and put up with it as the background material is really necessary to understanding the complexity of Hamilton's universe. By the time you're about 2/3 of the way through the first volume, the action will start to take off, and the remaining 5 volumes are a massive action packed extravaganza.
The story begins with the colonization of the planet Lalonde. Lalonde is a primitive colony, filled mostly with farmers. Criminals who have been sentenced to indentured servitude, called ivets, are sent to Lalonde to serve as labor for the colonists. One of these ivets, Quinn Dexter, is going to turn out to be very very bad news. To say more would spoil the plot, so I won't give any more details. Suffice it to say, Dexter will orginate a mess on Lalonde that will rapidly grow out of control, and become a threat to hundreds of planets across the confederation.
What makes Hamilton's work special is the amount of completeness of the world that he creates. The two major societies, Evenists and Adamists, are very well developed, and you can really gain an appreciation of the depth to which the cultures have been devloped. If I were to have to compare this to another work, I'd have to say the complexity is similar to (and even exceeds) that which Alastair Reynolds develops in the Revelation Space trilogy (another one of my favorite space operas).
My suggestion to you if you're considering read The Reality Dysfunction is to order both the first two volumes together (Emergence and Expansion). You'll have to plow through the background material in Emergence, but once you get into Expansion, you'll be so hooked on the series that you'll have to just go ahead and grab the remaining four volumes.
This review Copyright (c) 2005 by Scott M. Baker -- please do not use or publish without permission