Thursday, May 25, 2006

Book 35: The Reality Dysfunction: Expansion

I am unsure as to what to write. This is really the second half of The Reality Dysfunction, a thousand page science fiction novel. It feels like a third of a book, the middle half. The novel just jumps right in and I was working to figure out who some of the characters were. Joshua Calvert and Ione Saldana were easy, but many of the others? No clue. I figured enough out to get a grasp of what the story was, and Peter Hamilton does do a good job in advancing various storylines, but the problem is still that he may spend more than a hundred pages in between story points. It's tough.

I just don't know what to say. I liked the book. I am enjoying this Night's Dawn Trilogy. But there is just so much going on that I can't think of a way to concisely write about it. I could spend hundreds and hundreds of words describing the story points as I remember them.

Hamilton is detail heavy, so the book can be slow at times, and then he frequently describes sex in semi-detail and it can feel overwhelming when Calvert is on the page. Seems a bit much.

But the ideas and storypoints that Hamilton is working with here...fascinating. The "geneered" humans and "The Dead" rising, the voidhawks and history of humanity...I love the ideas here. Sometimes the execution is less exciting because it takes so long to get there. But I want to keep reading. It's not one of the best books I've read and even if this was a single volume, I don't think it would be.

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