Night's Dawn Trilogy, revisited

But only in brief, alas!

Stressed out from work, slow-cooking in the humid Buffalo summer, and unable to find a new book for the life of me, I decided to pick up Peter F. Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy again, from where they sit dominating their part of the shelf.

Alas! I find I cannot get through it a second time. That which pulled me in last time is just not enough this time around. I muscled it through The Reality Dysfunction, but a little bit into the Neutronium Alchemist I am calling it a day.

This is the ultimate SF space-opera junk-food, crammed full of guilty pleasures, and it goes on for a few thousand pages. The trilogy comes out to a very hefty 6 books in mass market paperpack, and I see they've just re-printed the trilogy in 3 massive trade paperbacks.

The good: well-fleshed out far-future SF. Lots of tech, lots of exposition. Aliens. Bio- & nano-tech galore. Living spaceships, living space stations. Satanism! Zombies? Historical personage fetish? Gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence.

The bad: plotting structure jumps all over the place. Viewpoint is third-person omniscient, which is fine, except that the view just hops every which way. We seem to get stuck following a random collection of characters for hundreds of pages, wondering where the "main" characters got. Often, the reader will abruptly follow someone who drops out of the story completely within a dozen pages or less. While there are chapters, they are just numbers, they don't structure the plot at all. Any given chapter will jump viewpoints and sublot with little or no rationale. It's great at mosaicing a universe and a situation from many angles; not so great to read. Worse the second time around. Also bad: Zombies? Historical personage fetish? Gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence.

The ugly: Hamilton hates the semi-colon! This will make it hard for us to ever be friends.

Also ugly: is it sexist or just full of sex? The sexual-physical evaluation of every female character by every male viewpoint character gets to be too much. There seems to be a belated moral in main character Joshua Calvert's eventual return to the minor girl he impregnated. I'm perfectly all right with lots of sex (particularly in the future, where both unhealthy repression and the negative side-effects of free love have been reduced or eliminated), but the constant reduction of women to sex-objects is something that bugs me after about a few hundred pages. In Hamilton's defense, his vision of the Edenist society is laudably egalitarian, with most of the -isms banished by biotech: group "affinity" creates psychosis-free individuals and a truly democratic state.

Also ugly: Hamilton brings up, but fails to critically engage with, a number of problematic ideas. The biggest on my twitch-list are the concepts of ethnic streaming, and a haphazard approach to social justice. The former is a policy undertaken the governments of earth, whereby each new planet is designated for a given ethnic/cultural group. This policy of apart-ness is never really examined, and while the interplanetary political scene seems devoid of prejudice, the problem of a culture/ethnic group as having a defined unity doesn't even come up. In the few instances where Hamilton engages with issues of social justice he seems mixed up, offering half-hearted criticisms of the socially stratified, unequal distribution of wealth and power (with the egalitarian Edenists hanging in the background) before diverting to almost Ayn Rand-ian confirmation of the basic goodness of the wealthy.

Also ugly:Zombies? Historical personage fetish? Gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence.

And finally, ugly: Deus ex Machina. One of these days, Hamilton will write something that doesn't depend on one of those at the very end.

Not to knock it too much! If you haven't read "Night's Dawn" yet, and like space opera, this is hours upon hours of enjoyment. The faults just turned out to be a bit too much for me the second time through.

Next time: a new novel? I hear rumors of a book club starting somewhere in my circle. I'm also starting a new blog, on coffee! of all things, so we'll see how that goes.