The Reality Dysfunction

I loved this.

I think the only problem was that there were so many story lines that I occasionally lost track of who was who and who was doing what where. It took a long time to get into the action, too, though I think in retrospect I appreciate the buildup and the mystery, wondering what was going on. I will admit to having to reference a Wikipedia page when I set the book down for a day or two to remember exactly what had happened and where I was in the book.

On that note, WOW, is Hamilton good at foreshadowing. Color me impressed -- things that were happening or even just ancillary to the story in the first chapter were insanely important in the last.

Nifty.

The author does a great job of making you care deeply about characters after only a few short paragraphs, dropping you into the middle of their lives (and the universe) and letting you figure out the nitty gritty details. That being said, Josh Calvert is a huge Mary Sue (but perhaps a forgivable one). The author also does a great job at building the massive shared universe, but I didn't feel the normal sense of urgency or climax at the end of the book I normally do. Partly this could be due to my reading pace. I think this is may also be since the book is obviously part of a trilogy. However, this book was engaging and, knowing it won't be dragged out forever, I'm curious to read the next book. I have a few guesses of my own of what's been set up and will come to pass so I'd like to see if that's true. I'm especially curious to find out what happens to the myriad cast of characters.

Superior SF, makes you think both in what's explicit and implicit.

I am really drawn in by Peter F. Hamilton's writing style and find myself wanting to know more about the universe he had created. The characters are very well-written and struggle and grow throughout the course of the book. The 'Reality Dysfunction' he is describing in the book is quite a fascinating and complex concept and I'm looking forward to how it and the characters are explored in the following books. This is the second book I have read by this author (A Second Chance at Eden was the first) and I'm keen to read them all now.

Ok, I had this book lying around for almost 18 months. After reading the commonwealth saga, I was wary of starting this book, as Hamilton stories tend to be pretty heavy, and I was not in the mood for heavy. anyway, I had nothing else on my "to-read" pile(incredible, I know!) so I opened it, started reading and..stopped at page 22, disgusted. Ok, I get it, he likes lenthgy explanation of how ships works, how planet evolve, but... EVERYONE has described those in thousands of pages already, and it's BORING now. Space opera to me means "optimized" text that focus on the story, not on describing the frigging panel next to the door and the technology that allows to open it. One example of wasted text(well, the whole of chapter 2, describing the evolution of a planet, is wasted text but here is a smaller example) "The hull breach wrecked thirty percent of our jump nodes. We're a navy ship, we can jump with ten percent knocked out, but thirty.. looks like we're stuck out here..." This whole sentence should have been written as "That hull breach took out our jump capability." Period. Nice, short, simple, effective, doesn't bore you to death. Star Trek was popular because it said "dillithium is required for warp drive" and that's it, no boring talks around it to try to sugarcoat it. 22 pages that felt like 300. for a 1100 pages book, that's not a good thing. I like lengthy read, but no way I'm ever opening this one again.

I’ve read, or attempted to, my share of stupid books over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a book this damn stupid in my entire life! I’m astounded, because The Reality Dysfunction has a great 4.24 rating on Goodreads, one of the highest ratings I’ve ever seen. Yet, it’s unbelievably stupid. I don’t see how anyone could possibly read past the first three chapters and not laugh their asses off at the sheer idiocy of the author. Cause that’s how far I got before giving up. And I’m not going to read the sequel, which has a higher rating than this! Unreal.The first chapter isn’t that bad with a chase and destroy scene between three presumably white “good” starships and five black “bad” starships. Nothing to write home about, in fact a little boring, but an okay start. Actually, too much sci fi jingo, like the author’s trying to impress his audience with his sci fi tech knowledge. It’s weak.The second chapter is about a planet. An alien planet somewhere … out there. It formed out of a nova or dwarf or something and then with the right light and elements, became life bearing and after billions of years, algae evolved. And then you get a whole damn chapter on evolution on this planet, which frankly mirrors Earth’s pretty closely. Why the hell is this there? Why couldn’t this have been a two paragraph aside somewhere? Why does this boring shit merit its own chapter? Who cares about how this evolution occurs? Allegedly, according to reviewers, for this author, it occurs pretty much the same way on every planet, so what’s the big deal?The third chapter is the bozo chapter. A ship is bringing its 108-year-old female captain and her husband back to Saturn to die. Apparently, she’s outlived it and he, cause I guess it’s a HE, tells her It’s Time. Cause they talk telepathically. Cause they have some sort of emotional love link. Cause she tells him that of her three husbands and two lovers, she loves her ship more than anyone ever. She tries to talk it out of dying, but he insists he must. They talk about her 10 children/zygotes she has finally produced after 108 years, one of them with her current husband’s sperm. As she goes by each zygote, the ship names each one. It’s agonizing to read each paragraph as it oh so romantically goes on and on about how great each one will be. Then the moment comes when they must separate. It’s horrible. She can’t take it. Her husband, who apparently can also talk to her telepathically, leads her away from the ship to a terminal, since it has magically docked without our being told, and this is a terminal for captains to mourn and see their ships die and console each other and basically hold funeral services. I’m not fucking kidding.It gets worse. Free of the humans, the ship goes off and calls to his fellows and similar ships answer his call in droves and come to it while he goes flying off. One links to him, I guess physically, even though they’re going at about nine gees and they don’t collide and blow each other up, which is a miracle, and through their link, they have a ship orgasm. Yep. Not kidding. Then it’s time to birth the babies. I didn’t see this coming. One by one, ten ships come up to this flying ship and take a baby … ship and look after it, telling it where it is and herding it into the safety of Saturn’s rings, where they’ll be growing for the next 18 years when they’ll finally be adult ships and will have captains of their own. So this female human captain who had 10 babies, one of whom was from her husband’s own sperm, gave birth to 10 spaceships. Excuse me, but what the motherfuck is that??? And then, to top it off, a “bad” black ship invades and connects with the soon-to-die ship and they produce a baby ship which the original ship predicts will be the greatest of them all. Then this dying ship goes flying every which way and pretty much blows itself up, oh so romantically while everyone sheds a tear, yet is happy for it. To end the chapter, the black clad stranger/pilot walks into the mourning terminal and no one wants anything to do with him, so the captain goes to him and starts talking to him and starts joking about how she’s got some granddaughters she needs to marry off. To him. Oh.My.God. The most stupid chapter ever written in the history of the universe. Reading it was both priceless and sheer torture. I’ve never read anything like it and hope to never do so again.Apparently, other characters appear and other worlds come into play and apparently there are a ton of Satanists, although why, possibly billions of years in the future, there would be Satanists, is beyond me. This author has written quite a few sci fi novels, but what I don’t know what his personal background is. Most of the sci fi writers I read are actual scientists or come from a military background, or both. I get the idea this guy is neither. He probably owns a comic book store. Maybe he’s a middle school dropout. Whatever the case, this book is rubbish, the author is a ninny, and I’m glad I bought this used cause I could never forgive myself if I had paid full price for this piece of shit. Grudgingly one star, because I can’t give zero stars. Most definitely not recommended at all.

A flawed masterpiece.The flaws are linguistic. Word for word, Hamilton is not the best writer ever born. He sometimes runs two sentences together with a comma, this can be annoying. Also, sometimes you know what he means, but technically he hasn't said it.On the other hand, he's a superb story teller, with amazing control over many different strands. The themes are broadly sociological, mainly religion, politics and government, and social stratification. What really struck me, and which have stayed with me in the ten years since I first read it, are the ideas. It's like Arthur C Clarke, Iain M Banks and the internet all taken to the nth degree.Superb!

The first novel of the Night’s Dawn Trilogy opens with the sprawling galactic civilization of the Commonwealth. Edenists have developed technology operated by thought, and fly living voidhawk ships, which are bonded from birth to their captains. Adamists predominantly maintain the view that such technology is sinful, and rely on older technologies for their ships and worlds. Following well over a dozen stories, The Reality Dysfunction focuses in part on Lalonde, a small colony planet where the reality dysfunction begins-- what fugitive Edenist Laton describes as a Xenoc Energy Virus. Sequestering people and granting them strange and strong powers the new threat could bring civilization to its knees. Meanwhile on Tranquility, a habitat orbiting the Ruin Ring with the remains of a powerful ancient civilization, scientists are for the first time getting glimpses of what happened to cause a vibrant, powerful, and technologically advanced people to commit mass suicide. Tranquility and its leader, Ione Saldana, realize simultaneously that the descriptions from the Lyphill civilization are almost identical to the energy crisis. The new Captain Joshua, with a slight prescience that manifests as almost perfect luck, finds himself in the middle of the situation, trying to corner a new market exporting Lalonde’s wood and soon working to try to save the planet, or the last remaining non-sequestered humans. Laton’s warning slowly resonates with planetary governments and the military, though by the time they learn of it, it may be too late to contain the ‘virus’- souls of some of the departed seeking new bodies, willing to commit any torture to force a body to accept possession as a way to end the pain.I was not as certain of this book as I was of Great North Road (my first introduction to Hamilton), though by the end I was hooked. Some of the characters are far darker. One in particular, whom I’d hoped would cease to be, remained irritatingly present. Towards the end of the book the pace quickens, the storylines begin to converge, and the action grows more intense. The technology, civilizations, and landscapes are meticulously imagined and described, and the likeable characters are very likeable. And, as always, many things are not quite what they first appear to be.Hamilton is brilliant at hard science-fiction, and this may be seen in the technology of the Commonwealth, his descriptions of the evolution of flora and fauna in various star systems, and his take on how a non-organic spaceship might look.

I enjoyed it, but I didn't really get drawn in until the last half of the book.

Peter F. Hamilton has a fantastic sweeping imagination. He also does not lack in the ability to pack pages full of action, top quality science fiction and exciting terms like Kinetic Harpoon and Neural Nanonics. There was a lot of entertaining story and action in this book. The ending was a little strange for me and not as strong as the rest of the book but it didn't detract greatly from what was still a great story.

One of the most challenging books/serie i even read. The sheer size of the books is so daunting when you start in the first book.

The story is not overly complex in the general sense, however its told from quite a few different angles, so expect yourself to be going over already read pages to figure out where u heard that guy's name before.

It all comes together in the end (of the series) but at some points it really feels like the book is going nowhere, the first book was the hardest to get through due to well being mostly introductionary to the serie, and giving u the starting parts of the main story line.

On its own this book would not be worth 5 starts, but in the context of the total serie's i wish i could give it 6 starts :)

I knew when I started this one that it was not just the first installment of a trilogy but the first half of the first book in a six-book "trilogy." So I did not expect a complete story arc with all plot developments resolved and all loose ends tied up.I could also tell pretty quickly that I was not the primary intended audience. This passage from the opening battle scene (page 1) made that plain:"His neural nanonics relayed information from the ship's external sensor clusters directly into his brain. Out here in the great emptiness of interstellar space starlight wasn't powerful enough to provide an optical-band return. He was relying on the infrared signature alone, arching smears of pinkness which the discrimination programs struggled to resolve. Radar pulses were fuzzed and hashed by the ships' electronic-warfare pods."But still.I expected that at some point there would at least be a focal character, some good guys and some bad guys, a challenge to overcome or a foe to defeat, a prize to win or lose.Yet with a cast of thousands, it never became apparent in nearly 600 pages if there was a main character or even who the top ten contenders for the honor might be. New characters were introduced by the barrelfull, chapter after chapter, page after page, right up until a few pages from the end, many of them dragging such bargeloads of information (age, appearance, attire, birthplace, personal background, social class, physical prowess, employment history, political affiliation) that you thought they had to be important, even while knowing you were never going to remember all that stuff--only to have them disappear after one mention and play no further part.What's more, chapter after chapter introduced entire separate worlds, with different physical and atmospheric composition and characteristics, orbiting satellites, native species, natural resources, global governance, economics, social structures, etc., etc., etc., and vast technological scopes, complete with history, with the chemistry and physics of everything explained in encyclopedic detail. But there was no clue to which of these mattered to the story or why, or even if there was a story. It seemed as if the author was inventing for the sheer sake of invention, indiscriminately, just because he could.One word for it might be exhaustive. Another might be exhausting.I nearly gave up after six chapters and 124 pages, already weary of waiting for some constants of character, setting, and plot to emerge. After all, the author was working so hard. He must have had voluminous notebooks, charts, timelines, character bios, resources in hard science and speculative science, and much, much more. He was also exercising his thesaurus to death (although not always successfully). Surely this must all have been to some purpose.In fact, I pressed on because I was just curious enough to want to see where the author was going with all this.I never did.Book one-half of three resolves nothing. It is just acres and acres of setup. And the prospect of thousands more pages of relentless exposition is more than I can face. At the end of 588 pages there is no character prominent enough about whom I care enough even to wonder what happens next.Moreover, the writing has two flaws that I find intolerable. One is that it is rife with comma splices. My impression is that there are several on virtually every page. After a score of pages of that, I begin to feel short of breath. I can see why nobody gave this a careful, conscientious edit, but that doesn't mean it didn't need it.Almost as if to balance this debit with a credit, the author generates sentence fragments--hundreds of them--as if he were paying a fee to pair subjects with predicates.And the other flaw is that the author practically raises malapropism to a fine art. That thesaurus I mentioned? Time and again he makes a wrong word choice, as if picking from a list of near-synonyms without knowing which suited the case, or in some instances as if he just went with the first word he thought of and didn't give it so much as a second glance.A few random examples:"Enlistment offered a golden ticket offplanet, away from the rain, the heat, and the remorseless physical labor of the farms."The word he reached for was "relentless." But he missed."Lori evinced a five-room building standing apart from the others."In context he seems to mean "noticed.""Outside Colsterworth the rolling countryside was a patchwork of small fields separated by immaculately layered hedges."It simply makes no sense to say that hedges are purely and spotlessly layered.I'll just add two more excerpts without comment:"But while the Swithland {a boat} and her ilk were bland distaff inheritors utilizing technology instead of engineering craftsmanship, this grande dame could have been a true original."and"The colourful solid mirage sailed on regally down the river, its wake of joyous invocation tarrying above the brown water like a dawn mist."You can find all of these with the "search inside" function on Amazon. I gave the book two and a half stars and consider that generous. I recognize the tremendous effort that went into it. But as for the effort it would take to get something out of it--I leave that to hardier souls than I.

A great novel full of wondering science fiction and a huge cast of interesting characters. Really eager to continue the series with the next novel. Would definitely recommend for other sci-fi aficionados.

One civilization disappeared leaving only debris and more questions than can be answered. Another one evolved on a planet that should not be able to support intelligent life and yet, it does. Humanity had conquered the stars (based on race, religion and whatever else you can think of - Hamilton does not try to sell the story of the future where all nations and people work and live together).A weapon that can destroy worlds gets lost (in a way).Habitats and star ships are alive and can connect to the part of humanity that would accept them and everyone else in their minds. New colonies get created every day and people find their new lives and homes. The few villains needed for a story of this scope are introduces early in the story and evolve through it. The good guys are all accounted for... although they skirt the law and rules occasionally - but then they would not be believable.And this is just the beginning of the book - and the book is a beginning of a trilogy. Tens of plots and subplots that weave and collapse into each other; a long list of characters which interact and change and make sex and fight. A lot of technical details that can bore anyone that reads just for the action but do not care for the SF side of the story. And the big bad thing that noone can explain but that need to be explained if the universe is supposed to continue its existence (with the current residents still being there). The book start slow but then it lays the foundations pretty well - and that allows the whole story to hold together. And even when two people meet unexpectedly, the explanation is there - yes, it is needed for getting the story going but it is not there just for that purpose. And when the book finishes, you know that you had read the beginning of the story - there are a lot of questions that need answers, a lot of pieces that do not match any available slots and a lot of people that just do not seem to be what they seem to beNow I need to go and read the next two volumes because I really want to know what happens next.

Dense and thorough epic sci- fi, with a bit of hell mixed in. Setting-building at it's best.

I’ve read an awful lot of science fiction over the years, and recently returned to the genre after a lengthy absence. In doing so, I made a concerted effort to upgrade my reading list and familiarize myself with the new generation of sci-fi writers. My recent experience has been a real revelation. Whereas in the past, most of the science fiction I consumed was very easy to read and understand (Asimov as an example), some of the works I’ve sampled in the last year or two have quite literally been over my head.I read Dune (multiple times) many years ago. I proceeded on to the Dune sequels, but after two or three they became so philosophically dense that I lost interest. I recently read Herbert’s widely acknowledged masterpiece The Dosadi Experiment and again was forced to admit that I was incapable of appreciating it fully. Ditto for much of Philip Dick’s writing. In an effort to read all joint Hugo/Nebula Award winners, I ran into a few other such works. Some of the new generation of sci-fi writers have published undeniably outstanding novels that I simply couldn’t enjoy fully. Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson and Ian McDonald come immediately to mind. These cats are just too intelligent for me to relate to (and I have a post graduate degree!).Others, such as Joe Scalzi, David Brin and Joe Haldeman crank out easily understood and entertaining work (in the mode of Asimov), but without all the heavy lifting some of the previously cited authors require. All of this to say, that in Peter Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction I discovered what I felt was a very happy medium: Vastly entertaining, but with just the level of challenge and difficulty that I could master without detracting from my enjoyment of the reading experience. There are some pretty heavy concepts in this novel, yet I never felt that I was lost or over my head. Outstanding example of “hard” science fiction.One of my science fiction pet peeves are hackneyed alien life forms. Multi armed/legged creatures, insect or other animal like beings, as if alien life forms have to fit into human constructs. Larry Niven’s Ringworld is a perfect example (giant cats and Pierson’s Puppets). While this novel has some of that, it also has some very intriguing alien life forms which do not fit neatly into our preconceived notions of how an alien may look or behave. It also includes sentient habitats and spaceships, a concept I first encountered in Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children.At over 1,000 pages, and only the first of three books in a series, this is an undertaking that requires a significant time commitment. There are also a dizzying number of plot threads which could be hard to keep straight. Not the kind of book that you read for a while, put aside and take up again a few weeks later. However, if you’re up to the challenge, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. On to book two.

I was rather apprehensive of this doorstop of a book, but I needn't have worried. Hamilton takes up a cracking pace, even with extensive world-building. Even when the story veered into quasi-religious zombie horror, the pace didn't slacken and that carried me through something that in any other book would have made me hurl it aside in disgust. But quite apart from the irresponsibility of such an action in this case - the risk of injury to passers-by is too great, given the size of the book! - it says much for Hamilton's ability as a writer that in a universe of wonders, he is able to carry off the necessary suspension of disbelief when he introduces elements of the fantastical. I reached the end in a state of amazement, only partly due to finding that a 1200-pager in this author's hands was not a chore.

I really enjoyed two of Hamilton's recent books (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained), so I've been planning to read his "Night's Dawn Trilogy" for a while, due to the many positive reviews here. Problem was, it was released as six books back in the Nineties, and they were out of print. Last fall, Orbit republished the series as a trilogy of massive 1300-page doorstops. I dove in eagerly, hoping for a good, long story. Two months and nearly 4000 pages later, I'm finally done. My main impression? Good, but much too long. There's at least a whole third that should have been left out; the entire Neutronium Alchemist thread has nothing to do with the rest of the story. So, right there, the trilogy could have easily lost 1000 pages or so and been a stronger tale for it. As for the remaining 3000-page story, here are my thoughts. (This review treats all three books as one long story. It can't be read any other way.)The reading of this thing took so long, and I invested so much time in it, it was almost like a small relationship: at first, NDT seemed like a good, meaty space opera, and captured my interest. Hamilton is an excellent writer, with some faults, but he's good enough to make you overlook them. The book began as a standard sf novel, taking pains to sound authoritative and scientifically accurate. But then it suddenly veered off into Stephen King territory, which totally threw me. I had bought all three volumes, was hundreds of pages in, and suddenly I'm reading a story about possession, ghosts, and human sacrifice, along with FTL travel and galactic empires. I opted to see it through, despite some grave (no pun intended) misgivings. I wanted to see how Hamilton managed to explain, in a scientific way, how the "beyond" (purgatory, to you and me) worked. So I kept going.This is one of British writer Hamilton's first books, and it's very British. Planets have names like Norfolk, towns are named Durringham, people have names like Kingsley Prior. I can only imagine that, in his early work, Hamilton didn't imagine he'd have readers outside the Realm. (His later books aren't so provincial.) It's part of Hamilton's Point, I think, that despite 600 hundred years of scientific progress, mankind is still employing the same economic--and cultural--model. The events in the book make people question that their way of life by the end, and that's the Point. Problem is, it isn't until you reach page 3500 or so that you realize he's deliberately painted a picture of a future that still has people saying "jolly good!" and "fab." At first, I thought he was just being lazy or imaginative. But there is a Point. You've just got to hang in there to see that. So suspend your critical thinking when you read about "arcologies" (domed cities on Earth built in response to climatic and ecological disaster), a planet where it may as well be the Green and Pleasant Land of the 1800's, and everyone talks as though they were from the early 21st century.Our main hero is Joshua Calvert, a Han Solo-type of guy who's hard not to like. I would like to see the story rewritten as Joshua's story. This would've made it much stronger as a story, for one thing. As it is, the story is told from so many points of view, it's impossible to keep them all straight. There's literally a cast of hundreds here. Many of these people are not very likable, either, nor worth spending time with. This story (and its Point) would benefit from a good, strong moral main character, and while Joshua does evolve and grow during the course of the novel, he's off-camera too much, and we don't really get inside his head enough. His "conversion", therefore, is a bit unconvincing. He starts out as young guy (early 20's) exploring space ruins to make a buck. His goal is to finance the refitting of his dead father's starship, the (what else?) 'Lady Macbeth'. He makes a big strike, the Lady Mac is quickly up and running, and suddenly, without training or experience, Joshua is the hottest pilot in the universe. (Okay, fine, it's a story and we know our demographic...) Girls fall all over our hero (again, the demographic), and he's not much more throughout the book than The Guy We All Wish We Were. Hamilton could've made him more than just a cavalier space jockey, and focused the story on him more. Things get interesting when he interacts with Ione, the human symbiont of a major habitat. The girl Hamilton focuses on, however is Louise, who comes from Planet England (Norfolk). She's a spoiled aristocratic brat and I didn't like her.The one really interesting sf idea Hamilton describes is the cultural divide between the Edenists and the Adamists. (Where these terms come from, he never explains.) Edenists have adopted bitek, which is biological technology. Space habitats are grown from a seed, and are sentient. They are mated with a human in a symbiotic relationship. Edenist starships (called voidhawks) are similar. Edenists share a telepathic communications link with all other Edenists called affinity. The rest of humanity (the Adamists) reject bitek and affinity, though everyone has a nanotech interface installed which performs much the same function as affinity. Why the Adamists reject bitek is never explained (as far as I could tell, and I was looking), and this is weakness in the book.Though Hamilton is a good writer, his pacing needs work. As I said, this book needs to be a lot shorter. But Hamilton doesn't seem to know how to abbreviate or summarize. Everything is shown in detail, in real time. Some heavy editing would have helped here. For example, every time a spacecraft begins or ends a flight, we are told how it deploys or retracts its "thermo dump panels." Every. Single. Time. The mechanics of things take on too much importance, overshadowing the story and the characters. Even battles are described in mechanistic detail, enumerating exactly how many of each type of weapon, how much force an explosion generated. Do we really need to know how many beds that barracks holds? And that the bathroom is communal? Massive detail and describing every event does not result in verisimilitude; it just makes for a long, drawn-out story.The future seems so much like our present. Perhaps Hamilton was trying to make a point (i.e., humanity has stagnated), but it isn't until the last 100 pages that the reader is let in on the Point, and the reason for the stagnation. There is an awful lot of time spent on Norfolk, but the aristocratic society seems to be shown in, if anything, a favorable light. Louise slowly comes to learn how her idyllic life has been built upon the toiling backs of others, but Norfolk is not like most of the Confederation. Perhaps Hamilton thought it would make his point by being so extreme, but because I didn't know what his point was till the very end, it just seemed like he thought it was cool to have a world that was like jolly old England.Though many reviewers seem to be unhappy with his ending, I thought it was consistent, though rather weak. Hamilton has a message to deliver, having to do with our evolution as a race, and how the fortunate and well-off have a responsibility to the less-fortunate. A rather liberal message, though a bit simplistic. I would have liked the story much better if Hamilton hadn't gone off the science-based rails. I don't like horror, for one thing, and this book spends a lot of time being a horror story. The metaphysics of possession were completely unconvincing to me, and I read through those sections just waiting for them to be over. No scientific basis for Hamilton's purgatory is ever offered, either. He seems to expect his readers to accept the possibility of souls, purgatory, and an afterlife (of the Frank Tipler Omega Point variety, but still). I'm guessing that, because it's "space opera" and not "hard sf," somehow it's okay to throw in metaphysical hogwash. Perhaps the marketing folks thought it would have more appeal with some horror thrown in. Didn't work for me. I would have enjoyed a more believable, realistic enemy or conflict. Instead Hamilton gives us a parody of Al Capone and a low-life cardboard cutout named Quinn Dexter running around zapping people with "energistic" beams of white fire. I nearly gave up on the book several times in disgust.The book in a nutshell: The watershed event in our civilization comes 600 years from now when a freak event occurs (an alien species, by some arcane, unclear process, somehow opens a channel up, allowing souls in Purgatory to begin possessing living humans). Then, at the end, a nearly omnipotent entity gives Our Hero unlimited powers, and he puts all to rights in about five pages. So the beginning of the conflict and its resolution are both deus ex machina. Something miraculous happens which sets off a 4000-page chain of events, and we read about every single one of those events, in detail. Then, something miraculous happens once more, ending the conflict. In the end, it turns out that the pressure to change things comes about because people realize that souls are ending up in purgatory (the "beyond") because society hasn't given them a fair chance to develop their potential. Say what?Conclusion: Hamilton writes like an engineer obsessed with how his machinery operates. At the detail level, it's all very interesting and convincing. It's when you look up from the nuts and bolts (and thermo dump panels) you realize the overall story is a flimsy construction. If you don't mind your science fiction mixed with second-rate horror/fantasy, with a dash of sophomoric social philosophy, then I'd say go for it. And be prepared for a long, slow ride.

I picked this book up on a whim whilst travelling in New Zealand. Up to that point, and since, I have not read a book that builds up such a detailed universe of cultures, characters and technology as this one. Yes it does take a while to get into, but once it gets going; the story and pace are fantastic. The story threads both amaze and annoy at once, as you get into one plot line just to be pulled out and dropped into another (character group, planet, story); but this just makes you realise how drawn into the book you are.It is a mammoth first part of a mammoth trilogy; but worth it - even if it did make me miss a large amount of fantastic scenery, as I read in the car whilst my mates drove around New Zealand (I had to do something other than look out the window - the radio out in the sticks in NZ is dire).

Top notch science fiction of the best kind.

A very interesting book compassing a large and detailed universe. I read the Confederation novels (Pandora's Gate and Judas Unchained) first, and what you can see is that there's a lot of shared topics between theme. It some ways, it feels like a practicing precursor - which is not meant to degrade the book in the least; it delivers the story in Hamilton's usual exhilirating way. Even though the later books feature a similar storyline, modulo the "Zombies in Space!" effect, there's no sense of spoilage, just the occasional bout of déjà-vue.If you're in for the straight action, you might experience a bit of boredom at the passages detailling the background story of the universe, but to all hard sci-fi fans, it's a must-read.

Massive, epic and breath-taking science fiction from Peter F Hamilton. This was the first book by this author I have read but it will not the last. The Reality Dysfunction is the first installment in a trilogy collectively called The Night's Dawn Trilogy.