The Neutronium Alchemist - Peter F. Hamilton

Last October I read Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction on a trip to my girlfriend's family in Norway. These books are ideal for travel. Huge but not taking up too much space in the suitcase. Although I was not overly impressed with the first novel in the Night's Dawn trilogy, my compulsion not to leave series unfinished kicked in so I decided to give him another shot. The Neutronium Alchemist is most certainly not free of the things that annoyed me in the previous novel, but I must admit it is as compulsively readable as the first one. It is still bloated though. In fact, the page count of this volume is even higher than that of the previous book. This series could have been so much better if it had been a bit leaner.

The dead are returning from a horrible limbo called the beyond and take over the living's bodies. The souls of these possessed are locked away in the recesses of the mind, always aware, but unable to influence matters. This horrible fate is bad enough, but the returned dead are also able to manipulate matter in ways science can't explain. They are extraordinarily powerful and have no intention of leaving or dying again. Faced with the double threat of an invasion of angry deceased and religious turmoil caused by the revelation of a horrible afterlife, the various factions try to pull together and come up with a strategy to deal with the greatest existential crisis in human history.

The situation is quite dire at the beginning of this novel. Possessed are overtaking one planet after another, usually wrecking them in the process. They are far from unified though. To illustrate that, Hamilton gives us three major points of view of possessed characters. Two of them are historical figures. Al Capone, whose syphilis wracked mind resumes to working order after being inserted into a healthy body. He has no clue how society developed since his death, but what he does understand is power. Soon he becomes a force to be reckoned with. Christian Fletcher, the Bounty mutineer, is pretty much his opposite. Well mannered and thoughtful where Capone is crude and decisive, he has quite a different view on what the possessed ought to be doing in the universe. A third, more chaotic point of view is presented by Kiera Salter, who is locked in a struggle for power with the mind of a habitat in orbit around a gas giant.

There is another possessed with a big role in the story. Quinn is turning into the Gollum of the series. He is clearly evil, but not aligned with any of the parties. He is in fact so purely bad that he is by far the most boring character in the book. He will use and discard anyone and anything to get nearer to his goal, which appears to be turning Earth into a satanic planet. Where Capone is building something, corrupt as it may be, Quinn just leaves destruction in his wake and doesn't look back. I hope Hamilton will find a better use for this character in the next book.

On the other side of the conflict it would appear most of the characters are busy chasing what appears to be a side plot. Captain Calvert is busy chasing a rogue scientist who knows the location of a weapon so powerful it can snuff out whole suns. He has half the intelligence officers of several other human factions on his tale. While I don't doubt this weapon, The Alchemist as the characters call it, will be important somehow in the next book, it seems like Hamilton is spending an awful lot of words on it while there are clearly other pressing matters to attend to. One good thing about this quest is that Calvert is too busy to have sex though. The apparently inevitable sex scenes are moved to Capone's sections, which I have to admit is somewhat in character, if still very much a male fantasy.

What bothered me most about the plot is how Hamilton tiptoes around the big philosophical questions his premise raises. There is a proven afterlife and apparently it isn't pretty. The two main branches of humanity each face their own challenges. The Adamists take their name from the patriarch of the large monotheistic relations. Their holy books will require some rewriting. The Edenists view death differently. They digitalize their personality and live on in the Edenist habitats. If their souls end up in the beyond anyway, what does that mean for the programming they leave behind? There is some interesting material here to explore and yet pretty much every character consciously ignores these questions. You'd think that somewhere in the 1,200 pages of this novel, a bit of reflection on these things could have been inserted. It would certainly have added a bit of depth to the novel.

Hamilton raises the stakes in The Neutronium Alchemist, as a middle book is supposed to do. It does more or less suffer from the same problems as the previous novel though. Bloated, repetitive and not very demanding. Although Hamilton tries to make it a multi-faceted conflict, he avoids the really big issue in the story in favour of politics and battles. That might be fine with some readers. I would have liked a little more from this novel but after The Reality Dysfunction, that was hardly what one could expect. Another beach read then. I think I will save the final volume for the next trip abroad.

Book Details
Title: The Neutronium Alchemist
Author: Peter F. Hamilton
Publisher: PAN Books
Pages: 1,273
Year: 2012
Language: English
Format: Mass Market Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-4472-0858-7
First published: 1997

The Reality Dysfunction - Peter F. Hamilton

The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton is the massive first novel in his Night's Dawn trilogy. Hamilton is one of a group of British writers producing what can be considered a reinvented form of space opera. He is usually listed with people like Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter and Paul J, McAuley. I haven't read too extensively in that particular subgenre, the only author on that list whose work I am familiar with is Alastair Reynolds. While I can see the similarities in their approach to science fiction, this novel leads me to believe Reynolds is the better writer. In The Reality Dysfunction the emphasis seems to be very much on the soap opera part of the subgenre.

In the twenty-seventh century, humanity has colonized many planets and made contact with alien species. Genetic engineering has made widespread adaptations to living in space or alien environments possible. Space ships can be grown as well as built. With this increase in technological capabilities, the destructive power of weapons has increased as well. The Confederation navy is keeping the peace however, and a prosperous future for all of humanity is within reach. Then, an indentured criminal makes contact with a truly terrifying entity. It has made contact with sentient species before and caused the suicide of an entire species. This extinct species called the phenomenon the reality dysfunction. A nightmare of galactic proportions is about to descend on humanity.

The first thing that will strike the reader about this novel is that it is huge. I read it during my trip to Norway two weeks ago and its very size is why I picked it. One book that would take a while to finish but doesn't take up much space in the suitcase. My mass market paperback weighs in at 1,225 pages. I think it is probably in the 400,000 words range. In other words, there are trilogies shorter than this novel. It has to be said that Hamilton paints on a large canvas but that still does not excuse the excessive length of it. The novel is in fact severely bloated. So much so that more than a few readers will find it exhausting or even unreadable.

It takes the author about 200 pages to even give us the first hint about the nature of the threat humanity is facing. Most of the first  half of the novel is reserved for worldbuilding and introducing a very large cast of characters. Every location the novel visits is introduced with an  infodump of several pages on the history, settlement, development, society and environment of the planet. Reading a lot of fantasy, I can admire a good bit of worldbuilding but Hamilton manages to make it tiresome in this book. With a bit of editing and a better balance between pace and worldbuilding this book could have been, and should have been, a lot shorter.

The cast is huge but it does have two more or less central characters. The first is a trader and captain of the star ship Lady MacBeth Joshua Calvert. He could have been modelled on Poul Anderson's David Falkayn. Roguish, independent and resourceful, Calvert has a good eye for the best deal and an even better eye for opportunities to fool the authorities. He also has a way with women that is rather grating. Not until the very end of the novel does someone point out to him that he essentially treats them like shit. The sex scenes involving Calvert are another repetitive element that could have been axed to keep the page count down. I had mixed feelings about this character but he is the best developed one of the bunch. Most of the other characters are much more in service of the plot.

Where Calvert can be thought of as the protagonist, Quinn Dexter is clearly the antagonist. Originally from Earth, a place crippled by overpopulation and environmental degradation, he is convicted to indentured service on Lalonde. He is a rather stereo-typical villain. Egoistic (a trait he shares with Calvert), ruthless and determined to carve out a position of power for himself on his new home planet. He does so by any means necessary, until he runs into someone even more dangerous than he is anyway. I could say that there is not much development in his character but that would strictly speaking not be true. He more or less transforms into another person. Going into that would give away too much of the plot though.

Although the threat encountered by colonists on the planet Lalonde is the main conflict in the novel, there is quite a bit more going on in human occupied space. Humanity has split into two branches: the Adamists and the Edenists. The Edenists are extensively genetically engineered humans. They form a mostly atheist society without much in the way of social stratification. The Adamists are more diverse but tend to keep the genetic engineering down to very basic levels, like eliminating hereditary disease. There is a good deal of mistrust between the two, which I suspect Hamilton will exploit in the next two volumes. This dichotomy is one of the many present in the novel. Hamilton likes doing things in two, which does not always result in the most nuanced of visions.

While there were quite a few things I wasn't too impressed with in this novel, I have to admit it is compulsively readable after the first four hundred pages or so. You really want to find out how the story of this or that character continues even if you have to wait a hundred pages for them to show up again. In essence, The Reality Dysfunction is a great beach read. It'll keep you reading while not being overly demanding. There is much better written space opera out there in my opinion, but I can still see why Hamilton has acquired an audience. Maybe I'll even pick up the second volume the next time I'm travelling.

Book Details
Title: The Reality Dysfunction
Author: Peter F. Hamilton
Publisher: PAN Books
Pages: 1,225
Year: 1997
Language: English
Format: Mass Market Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-330-34032-8
First published: 1996