I’m sensing a theme in Peter F. Hamilton’s books. Well, the two that I’ve read so far. In both Pandora’s Star and in The Reality Dysfunction, he builds up big sprawling space-faring human civilizations, and then threatens them with immense danger, almost certain to wipe us off the map.
The Reality Dysfunction was so big that the publisher split the book into two parts for the U.S. release. Incredible, because the story continues in The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God, both of which were also too big for single paperback volumes and were split for publication in that format as well. In other words, this is six books. If the lengths of the following books compare to The Reality Dysfunction, we’re talking about over three thousand pages worth of story. It’s long.
If you haven’t read part 1 yet and don’t want spoilers, stop reading now and go read your copy.
It may be long, but it’s not bad. Expansion picks up with the word getting out to the rest of the Confederation that something is going very wrong on Lalonde, the colony planet being taken over in Emergence. The Lalonde Development Corporation mounts a mission of mercenaries to save the planet. Hired from Tranquility, the ships include Joshua Calvert captaining the Lady Macbeth. But by the time they get back to Lalonde, an ominous red cloud has appeared over the bulk of the habited area of the planet, blocking all communication and sensor sweeps. Still, they land the mercenaries anyway, hoping they’ll be able to find a weak spot to bombard.
This is where everything goes haywire. At this point, we (the readers) know whats happening is that the souls of the dead are returning and possessing bodies below, bringing with them incredible power to unleash energy as well. They can shoot white balls of plasma fire. They can reconstruct towns in images of medieval times in a matter of minutes. And they have refined the art of possession quite nicely. Some of the planes that land are quickly taken over; their pilots possessed by the dead. Thus begins a desperate space battle between possessed crews and free crews. Joshua Calvert is preternaturally aware, and he struggles to survive.
In the midst of this, the alerted Confederation Navy appears. Much smarter than the ragtag mercenary armada, they realize quickly even they are in an unwinnable situation and they withdraw. Through his wiles and that of the mercenaries he transported, Calvert must outwit the possessed, rescue the survivors, and save the damsel in distress!
About the only thing keeping me from recommending this whole-heartedly is it’s length. Otherwise, it’s fine space opera. And I suppose without the length Hamilton wouldn’t be able to make the reader care about the characters. Because, as I wrote in part 1, that’s his strength. Despite his attention to technological detail, he does a hell of a job putting the reader inside each and every single character. Even the dog. There are fewer of them in Expansion, but there are still a lot. And the large part of them are all fighting the battle on and around Lalonde, making it seem like differing points of view of the same thing rather than different stories altogether like Emergence felt like.
Hamilton is also less into world-building in this half. By now, he’s established all the major scenes and forces and he spends the time instead on what’s happening rather than introducing new things. Everything moves. Fast. Have to keep up.
Luckily for me, Hamilton also leaves out a lot of the clichés that so bother me. Only one or two characters do the obviously stupid things, and they do them because they are obviously stupid characters. Too many authors can’t write well enough to place their characters in the danger that makes the story happen, so they resort to supposedly smart characters doing really dumb things like let’s go back in to warn the others
. Now, a certain amount of such people exist in real life. Just watch Cops a few times. And so a few of those types exist in Expansion. The commander of the mercenary fleet, for instance, decides to send in the troops thinking that the ominous red cloud on the surface can’t hurt him in space. But when the Confederation Navy arrives, its admiral tells everyone to avoid doing anything to antagonize the planet. He’d rather wait to figure out a sure-fire way to take it on rather than go in with guns blazing. Unfortunately for him, it’s a bit too late and he’s pulled in to the mercenary mess.
Still a little peeved that this ends up being essentially a zombie story though. All this technological prowess in human civilization: nanotechnology, faster than light space travel, telepathy, time stasis, and more including alien technology as well, and it all comes down to a horde of zombies ominously advancing despite being knocked down by vast weaponry. No doubt, the zombies have their own weaponry as well, so it’s a bit more involved, but it has that zombie feel to it.
A few last nice small points before I end the review. I like that Hamilton humanizes the bad guys. They are still bad. But remember that no person really thinks of themselves as evil. Even the zombies have a reason for the actions they take. Many vast epic stories focus on the elites running the world. Tolkien does this. Lucas does this. Eddings very much does this. But Hamilton also tells the stories of the little people. It makes for a broader story. And I definitely like the hanging threads for The Neutronium Alchemist. It doesn’t end on a cliff-hanger. The story certainly isn’t over, but it doesn’t end with and then the warships appeared in the air above the city with bombs that would doom them all!
Those kinds of endings make me hate series and sequel writers. I have to tune in next time (which can be a long time later) to see what happened to end the scene. Hamilton doesn’t end mid-scene. The story is incomplete, but the scene is. Lots and lots of loose threads that can be tied in later. And we don’t know who wins the battle, humans or zombies. But at least we know who dies and survives in the climactic battle.
Title: The reality dysfunction: part 2: expansion
Author: Peter F. Hamilton
Series: Night’s dawn : 1.2
Imprint / publisher: Aspect / Warner Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 572 p.
Publication date: August 1997
ISBN-10: 0-446-60516-6
