How big is too big, how much is too much — even of a good thing? That's a perfectly valid question to ask, and I for one am known for nothing if not asking it, as critical as I've often been of the predisposition in modern SF and fantasy (mostly fantasy) towards bloat. When is it best to tell a story efficiently, with brevity, and when can one open up one's canvas on a grand scale in such a way that avoids the pitfalls of tedium and pretentiousness? Well, gang, if anyone has shown they can do the epic SF novel right, it's Peter F. Hamilton.
Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy has already made its mark among those who hold to the "size matters" writing ethic. Sometimes I felt like I'd been reading this 1094-page tome all my life. But I would argue that, as George R. R. Martin has done in the fantasy genre, so Hamilton has done in SF: demonstrated how to tell a massive story on an massive canvas that contains all the virtues of a more conventionally mounted novel, e.g., compelling character development, and a focused narrative that has true forward momentum and a bare minumum of padding. Despite its size and the investment it requires from readers, The Reality Dysfunction works. It just works. It is alive with the pulse of civilization itself. By turns peaceful, frantic, funny, horrifying, exciting, and unabashedly melodramatic, it is space opera played out on the grandest possible scale with an unlimited budget. It's a kick in the pants.
And that's because in the final analysis, Hamilton doesn't have pretentions for his story beyond delivering rip-roaring interstellar adventure, with a touch of horror thrown in to stir the pot. Long novels become pompous, insufferable bores when they take themselves too seriously as (adopt aristocratic English accent now) Literature. Hamilton has entertainment in mind, and though he explores common genre tropes as well as the religious and mythic aspects of human culture, he does so in order to assimilate them, not comment sagaciously upon them like some stuffy academic.
The future of Night's Dawn is set against a backdrop of interstellar art, commerce, politics, war, and faith — a vast alliance of colonized worlds called the Confederacy. Humanity has split off into two branches: the Adamists, whose bodies are extensively nanoenhanced, and the Edenists, who have gone that process one better by developing an "affinity gene" that allows for telepathic communication between not only themselves, but the organic and sentient spacecraft they pilot. The Edenists have also perfected a "bitek" technology that has resulted in the creation of the sentient orbital environments where they live — and into which, once they die, their affinity-bonded consciousnesses are absorbed. While the Adamists still practice religion that gives them a belief in heaven, the Edenists have solved the afterlife problem by creating their own.
Though the story features literally hundreds of characters with speaking roles, the plot itself is kicked into gear when devil-may-care spaceship captain Joshua Calvert, while scavenging the remnants of the mysterious and long-dead Laymil civilization that orbits a gas giant in what's called the Ruin Ring, stumbles upon a Laymil storage cell that can be restored. Its examination reveals information that could help explain the Laymil's sudden annihilation, an event to which they refer cryptically as the Reality Dysfunction.
Joshua's newfound wealth after discovering the Laymil relic opens up the high life to him, and, after numerous adventures including a bit of smuggling and romancing the heiress who rules the bitek habitat Tranquillity, he cuts a deal to export the exotic wood mayope throughout the galaxy. And mayope is only found on the backwater colony world Lalonde. But there are problems, to put it mildly, on Lalonde.
What at first appears to be an uprising among convict labor on the planet takes on a more sinister cast when reports start trickling in of colonists who appear possessed, whom no weapon will kill. And their numbers are swelling, leaving burned out colony towns in their wake. At first there is alarm that this could be the work of a renegade Edenist (a "Serpent") whose crimes resulted in the deaths of thousands and whose name is still widely feared years after his apparent disappearance. But soon it is clear there is much more to it, that the Confederacy is in fact facing an invasion the likes of which has never been dealt with before. Can this be the Laymil's Reality Dysfunction, come again to sound the death knell for humanity?
I must admit that it did take me about a hundred pages of the first volume to acclimate fully to Hamilton's storytelling approach. There is much Hamilton has to establish, but he doesn't keep you waiting long before the richness of his imagination is evident. Hamilton's Confederacy is an extraordinary panoply of contrasts, in which Adamist colonists get around their agrarian worlds on horse-drawn carriages while Edenist naval blackhawks patrol the spaceways looking for smugglers of antimatter weaponry. A scene early in the first volume depicting how the relationship between Edenist pilots and their sentient voidhawk craft works is simply breathtaking, particularly in the dying plunge that an aging voidhawk takes into the atmosphere of Saturn. I literally caught my breath there. It was a moment of lyrical beauty unlike anything I'd read before. It isn't so much that Hamilton has given space opera anything earth-shatteringly new in this story. It's his way of looking at familiar SF concepts in fresh ways. There are many moments throughout the story where readers are invited simply to bask in the majesty of the universe, recapturing that sense of wonder we all look for in the best SF.
All too often, long novels suffer the same crippling flaws. Either they meander all over the place in search of a solid narrative thread to grab hold of, or their plots are so thin to begin with that the author merely pads out the exposition to give his work the illusion of substance. Hamilton keeps a simple but strong plot at the core of The Reality Dysfunction at all times, and shows us with increasingly unnerving clarity just how the ramifications of what is happening on Lalonde are poised to affect civilization on an interstellar scale at shocking speed.
The book has literally everything plus the kitchen sink. Moments of pure horror and intense battle carnage are offset by scenes of quiet, peaceful intimacy, so we're constantly reminded of what is at stake. One scene that sticks in my mind — amongst action and melodrama setpieces so colossal that Jerry Bruckheimer would gladly mortgage his children for a chance to do something half as grand — is that of Joshua and his lover Ione cavorting with a newborn alien in the surf of an artificial beach aboard Tranquillity. These moments, when you can connect to his characters on the most natural level, are when Peter Hamilton makes you feel you've lived this book, not merely read it. And it's a feeling that helps to offset the very real exhaustion that, I admit, the story's size can't help but make you feel at times.
The Reality Dysfunction's harrowing climax, involving a rescue from Lalonde that all the wizardry of Lucasfilms couldn't top, will leave you breathless in more ways than one. On the one hand, you'll scarcely believe the book is finally over. On the other, it will immediately dawn on you that the story has only begun. The metaphysical implications of what Hamilton has going on are quite staggering, and the question remains, even if humanity manages to turn back this invasion, what then? That he can pull this off puts Hamilton amongst a rare breed of writers. If you've gotta do it big, do it well. Do it like this.
