Amateur Megalomania

Peter Hamilton writes bricks.

I first encountered Hamilton from the Science Fiction Book Club. They were selling the first four books of the Night’s Dawn series as two volumes: The Neutronium Alchemist and The Reality Dysfunction. Later, The Naked God (two books again in one volume) came along to finish off the series, which is either a trilogy or a hexology depending on how you want to count it.

Each of the six books are around 240,000 words according to Amazon.

Nearly one and a half million words in the entire series.

And I loved it all. It ended too soon, if such a thing is possible.

Now we have a two book series that started with Pandora’s Star. Amazon clocks that book at around 370,000 words.

I’ve just finished the second book of the series, noted above. I can’t find a word count on it, but it was 823 pages.

And this time, I was well aware of every single page and word. By the last hundred pages, I was skimming over entire passages. I really didn’t care about the entire conflict. The whole intricate thing just evaporated by the end.

In Pandora’s Star, the human Commonwealth, stitched together by wormhole technology, doesn’t have much use for starships. Until some obscure astronomer notices an entire star vanishing in the blink of an eye. Subsequent observations from different Commonwealth systems confirm that the star just winks out in an instant.

So a ship is built and they go to investigate.

After travelling the hundreds of light years to the target, they discover the star encapsulated by a Dyson Sphere, with no clues as to who built it.

Humans meddle. The Sphere is breached. We figure out too late that it was a containment effort. An enormously hostile alien life is unleashed and proceeds to stomp the crap out of humanity with no indications that compromise will ever be possible.

And the story spins from there. Hamilton is a master at large, complex casts of characters with many, many story threads going at one time. The elements of his earlier work are present here, with interesting characters and powerful technology in play.

But by the midpoint of Judas Unchained, it starts to get silly. And maybe this observation would horrify those who ‘get’ the deeper moral and ethical point Hamilton was trying to make.

The alien agressor is a hive mind, with staggering resources. The humans are tech savvy, but well behind in military equipment. In the first wave, the alien snatches 23 words and kills everyone. Then another 48 worlds, leaving the humans taking a long, hard look at their own extinction.

But all of this time, they have a couple of super weapons. Weapons that can tear apart matter at the quantum level. Or turn a star into a nova. Weapons that can turn the war.

Unfortunately, the characters spend most of the book worried about committing genocide against the alien.

They dither and debate, wringing their hands about potentially exterminating a virulent alien that doesn’t even recognize the possibility of existing with any other living being. Two thirds into the book I’m wishing I could push the damn button for them!

Genocide as a debate would have been much more effective if the alien had not been monolithic. Hamilton established an alien with one single driving intelligence, and every biological aspect of it a slave, like an ant to a colony. There is little room for concern in this situation. In a normal society of individuals, one could worry about the vast majority of the enemy who may be simply following orders, or not fully informed about the conflict.

But stomping out this alien is about as troubling as wiping out a virus.

As a Hamilton fan, I’m dissapointed. He’s proven he can do so much better than this.

Filed under: Reviews (Books and Movies)