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May 28, 2008

The Neutronium Alchemist - Peter F. Hamilton

The Neutronium Alchemist - Peter F Hamilton

Book 19 in my 52 books in 2008

This is the second volume of the massive "Night's Dawn" space opera trilogy. I made a bit of a mistake leaving so long an interval between reading this and "The Reality Dysfunction". Hamilton has provided no synopsys, and you're expected to hit the ground running in terms of plot and characters, and I found that a bit tricky sometimes.

However, I quickly got stuck in for the marathon read, managing maybe 40 dense pages a day. This is challenging stuff, but always interesting and never slow paced. There are always battles, arguments and chases with spectacular ideas and revelations around every page-turn.

But when an author decides they need nearly 3500 pages to tell a story, you have to ask the question, Why? Couldn't some of the slack be cut and still leave all the important stuff? Isn't a lot of it unnecessary filler? And the answer is that I don't think you could here. It's a remarkably complex story, taking place across many star systems in the galaxy.

The story is about a type of very unusual virus. It is discovered and begins to spread in the first volume, and continues apace here. How would a planet cope, or an orbital habitat? You can be sure that there would be more than one way, and several different scenarios are played out here, which is interesting, as well as the interactions between the different 'solutions'.

There are big ideas about death here too, and the religious implications are touched upon a little more than before, but still not that much.

In short, I loved it. I could have read 5 other books in the same time period, but I'm happy with my choice.

Posted by se71 at May 28, 2008 11:39 AM

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