I’ve completed The Dreaming Void, from the mind of Peter F. Hamilton. I’m a bit of a sucker for omghuge space operas, and Hamilton certainly provided that in full with his humongous trilogy: Night’s Dawn. I know he’s not for everyone, Night’s Dawn in particular had a pretty… extreme take on the fiction part of Science Fiction that will leave some people disgusted. But I digress.
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The Dreaming Void is a new trilogy, and it was mostly fun and good. But good lord is it ever the first in a series, there’s not a lot of closure to be found anywhere. You’re left with, like, three distinct gigantic cliffhangers. Thank Christ the next book comes out in a month.
The book itself is charming enough.. I have no technical disparities to point out; the characters are swell and follow more or less reasonable arcs, the universe is well envisioned and certain people run around with sufficiently highgrade weaponry to destroy a small planet. What’s not to love. I gotta say though, I had the strangest feeling along the way that I was missing the bigger picture. There’s a city called Makathran2, where the Living Dream resides. The followers of Living Dream want nothing more than to accomplish the dreams of their prophet, who dreams of another universe.. Uh sorry, the who? The what now? And that’s just ten minutes in. Once you’re done you can sort of piece it all together, but along the way I was actually uncertain if this was really the second book in the series.
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My opinion is still in flux of course, the series won’t even be over until 2010 or something, but so far I’m going to rate this only sort of good. Maybe (and I really mean hopefully) that’ll change as all the pieces are revealed and the bigger plot starts churning. I guess he’s a notorious slow starter, much of the first Night’s Dawn book was naught but character-introductions and it certainly sprang to life. It’s just that with each book being longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy combined you’d think his characters could get somewhere within the span of a single book…
Still though, Void features all the highpowered weaponry and human foibles and, uh, telekinesis, that I care for, even if the events haven’t really truly grabbed a strong hold of me yet. His previous work, the Commonwealth Saga, had an inherently more.. enthralling universe I think. Commonwealth was full of trains of all things, which actually worked superbly well despite sounding odd. Also, the saga’s antagonist left a big impact on me. Whereas Void Trilogy so far is more of a meandering trip towards… something. I just hope it’s worth it.