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Oct 11, 2010

Susanne rated it:

I'm on page 450 and I don't know if I can finish this one. So far we've had:

Awesome:
- Humans biologically bonded to technology: Because I can't wait for my own neural link into the internets.
- Space colonisation programme, settlers, frontiers, etc. = I always enjoy this sort of thing.

Not so awesome:
The protagonist is a tremendous Gary Stu: not only do his adventures all turn out all right, he also ALWAYS gets the girl. He's handsome! In a roguish way! And as so More...

6 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 20, 2011

Jonathan rated it:

Awesome.

When I went through law school and then bar school I was forced to eject many vital tidbits of information that were taking up valuable space in my brain: my address, my year of birth, etc. I have no idea how Peter F. Hamilton holds all of this massive universe, its technology and characters in one noggin. He clearly does not remember his wife's birthday or his underwear size. We all have to make sacrifices.

The Reality Dysfunction is fun. Lots of fun. I flew thr More...

4 comments like (13 people liked it)

Oct 31, 2007

korty rated it:

Ah, the Night’s Dawn Trilogy. One of the most amazing, wild space opera’s ever written. In the UK it is 3 massive books, while here in the US they nickel-and-dimed us by splitting them up into 6. It doesn’t really matter though, because it is not so much a trilogy as it is one gigantic continuous story, regardless of where they are split. One book ends at whatever chapter, and the following book simply begins at the next.

Peter Hamilton is probably my favorite SF writer when it More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Ben rated it:

Thanks to Graham loaning me a copy, I learned that many of the books I had previously enjoyed, we actually quite weak and 2 dimensional by comparison.

A much longer book than I would normally read (especially considering the whole trilogy is around 4500 pages) but I would would been happy if it had continued to be twice the length.

Character development is great, and a good background is even given to people whose play only a small role in the plot. The technology is intere More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 25, 2011

Gunner rated it:

More than 700 pages into this book, and I'm still not interested. So many disparate scenes and characters and the "plot" barely moves forward. Even the characters I could keep track of were not interesting to me. All the explicit sex scenes got pretty old fast, as well. I also found it ridiculous that it's supposed to be set a couple millenia in the future, but everyone on every planet still uses slang like "bollocks" and "dickhead", not to mention airplanes by More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 31, 2011

Shawn rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Jul 27, 2011

Steve rated it:

A true space opera. At over a thousand pages for just the first part of the story, the Nights Dawn Trilogy is hefty to say the least. Peter F. Hamilton weaves a complex thread of narratives, introducing more characters than you can possibly hope to keep up with, but all the time you'll find yourself turning the page and reading on. The Reality Dysfunction spends 500 plus pages setting the scene for what ends up being a very thought provoking, gruesome and interesting story about human colonisati More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 27, 2011

Andreas rated it:

The trilogy itself consists of:

* The Reality Dysfunction
* The Neutronium Alchemist
* The Naked God

There are also two ancillary volumes:

* A Second Chance at Eden – short story collection
* The Confederation Handbook – reference volume

In the USA, each volume of the trilogy was published in two parts, as evidenced by the thumbnails.

The Night’s Dawn trilogy is a huge story spanning over 4000 pages, in truth one massiv More...

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Nov 20, 2010

Naithin rated it:

Review for the entire Night's Dawn Trilogy, which also includes:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47956...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45260...

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I read these after becoming interested in the author through exposure to the Commonwealth Saga, starting with the Starflyer books (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained).

I found this series to be better in almost every regard, except for the one main complaint I had with the Commonwealth books: Bloat. We're More...

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Sep 03, 2010

Bvarnum rated it:

I had never read anything by Peter Hamilton, and I actually picked this up because I liked the cover art on the third book in the trilogy. I had glanced at the back cover and it sounded good. I was blown away. Hamilton clearly knows his science and writes with an integrity to the future he's imagined. He pulls off a fantastically-advanced future without making our technology invincible; his aliens are infinitely more robust than simple biped mirrors of some aspect of humanity (for all that I More...

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Nov 08, 2009

Emily rated it:

It took a hell of a long time, but I've made it through The Reality Dysfunction, the first volume in a trilogy recommended to me by Ennis. It's a "space opera" about a futuristic society plagued by an evil force that "sequestrates," or maybe just possesses, people.

The story takes place in the Confederation in the 2600s. The set-up is quite detailed and interesting. One group, the Adamists, lives on a failing planet Earth and various other planets. The Adamists are m More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 02, 2009

Palmyrah rated it:

This is the worst-written book I've ever read twice. Hamilton is not just a bad writer but a bad writer in a hurry--superabundantly verbose, careless about style and tone, overdescriptive, flaccidly repetitive, malapropistic when he isn't spouting tired old cliches. He's a lousy scene-painter, too, careless about details and how they fit together and given to commencing every descriptive paragraph with the physical dimensions of whatever is being described--twenty kilometers long and weighing ni More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jul 07, 2010

Hugo rated it:

Unfortunately The Night's Dawn trilogy is a huge, festering shamble where a few nuggets of interesting story is drowned in a horribly over-long stream of irrelevant and meandering side- and subplots. It starts off ok, focusing on just one plotline, which leads up to a rather nice "?" moment, but then it seems like Hamilton lost all his marbles because the story loses all focus and coherence, and the only thing that kept me painfully reading the last 4000 pages was to find out how in th More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Sep 30, 2011

Greg rated it:

I'm warily adding this to my "currently reading" status. I'm only on page 47 but I'm doubting my ability to read another thousand pages of Hamilton's writing style. I'm disappointed because I bought this with a gift certificate and looked like just the kind of awesome epic I could get lost in with the upcoming winter months. But things aren't looking good between this tome and myself. My issues so far, in the short time I've been reading, are how deeply into "wtf" territory w More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 04, 2009

Felicia rated it:

Wow, what to say about this book. It is NOT EASY READING, that's for sure. The first 1/4 almost is like running through a valley of quicksand, but I swear the momentum is worth it. I felt my interest waning sometimes because it is SO DENSE, but then, rather than stopping, I'd skim a bit forward over all the meticulous details of the worlds etc and get back on track with some of the characters. This book requires stamina but if you're into sci-fi is worth the effort. All the thought and imag More...

4 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2010

Lee rated it:

I reread books a lot...if I find something I like, it usually goes on my shelf and eventually it will be re-read at least once. The Night's Dawn Trilogy is one of those books. I ditched the paper copies several years ago, after having read it in the late 90s, but I repurchased it on my Kindle.

There's a lot of negative comment on Goodreads about this book, but I don't agree with many of them. In some ways, you'd think Hamilton is like Dickens, not for the greatness of story or the qua More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 05, 2011

Tudor rated it:

After the initial shock with the hundreds of consensual sex and rape scenes and with the absurdity of an empty universe where the sinners' souls go, it was a very enjoyable read. I've read it immediately after A Dance With Dragons so the comparison was inevitable. There are so many common things between Night's Dawn series and A Song of Ice and Fire series, beginning with the main plot and ending with the number of pages. ASOFAI has much more interesting and lively characters but (and I never th More...

8 comments like

Jun 27, 2011

Nigel rated it:

These crooks on some backwater planet decide to start a satanic cult, and somehow they manage to open the door to Hell and evil ghosts start possessing everybody. Pretty soon it's like The Exorcist times one million, so what do the good guys do? They call in the space marines! ...it's just completely out of control: there's people getting massacred left & right, possessed people turning into monsters, whole towns getting nuked, a part where a dude drowns in a room full of puke... You won't belie More...

0 comments like

Jul 07, 2010

Sahil rated it:

When I read the title of this book, The Reality Dysfunction, my first thought was not that ghosts will invade the universe from a nether universe and that is what will be the major conflict in this book. In fact, from the synopsis on the book, the only hint we got of this supernatural plot arc was a vague one, "Space is not only the only void". No one told me I would be in for over one thousand pages of humans fighting other humans possessed by ghosts. I wish someone had told me (or, c More...

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Sep 24, 2010

Ben rated it:

The Reality Dysfunction was recommended to me by a work colleague, and I couldn't have been happier! This is one of those books, for me, which comes out of nowhere to blow your mind. Hamilton has created a rare gem with this book, and the series so far (I'm half-way through "The Neutronium Alchemist"). I really enjoy Hamilton's Universe; he has filled it with concepts and technologies which are brilliant, entertaining, and realistic. I often find myself wishing to be a part of the stor More...

0 comments like

Jun 06, 2009

Nathan rated it:

This is the first book I read by Peter F Hamilton and it got me hooked. It's not the best book in the series, I think the Neutronium Alchemist gets that vote, but this book certainly lays down the foundation for an exciting, detailed and complex universe for the reader. I was totally enthralled.

I really enjoy books that draw you in and create such a picture of in depth detail that you really feel as if you could be there. The Reality Dysfunction is one of those books. It conveys the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 05, 2011

Michael rated it:

I started out loving The Night's Dawn Trilogy, lots of sex and violence, but as the hundreds of pages slogged by, I became more and more frustrated with the pacing of the whole series and the story lines that had nothing to do with the main plot. There are SO many characters that a hundred pages could go by without coming back to a particular character's story line (and in the meantime you've forgotten what happened to him/her). There were also far too many plot points that were only thrown in More...

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Mar 25, 2009

Brian rated it:

The Night's Dawn Trilogy is my second experience with Hamilton's writing. A couple of years ago, I read Pandora's Star, and immediately decided to own that book. Now, understand that as an employee of a public library, book purchases don't happen frequently, so. . . but I digress.
The Reality Dysfunction was my least favorite of the three. It takes a while to get into the actual meat of the story, and a lot of it is honestly kind of smutty. By the end of the book though, I was completel More...

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Sep 10, 2011

Brian rated it:

The first book in the best space opera of the last 20 years. I'll always remember this as the first book I ever bought from the (then small) Amazon.com. It takes a lot to pull off a story about murderous ancient space zombies, but Hamilton imbues his tale with urgency and a grounding verisimilitude. You care about what happens to the (many, many) characters and to human civilization as a whole. This would've been a great 1970s miniseries or anime series, but it would never get made in the US bec More...

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Mar 26, 2009

Bruno rated it:

I stumbled across this book when I, aged 29, asked my 17 year old cousin to recommend some really "bad" sci-fi. (I was looking to return to my acne-riddled teenage years.) I specifically asked that whatever book he chose be chock-a-block full of sex and violence. Without hesitating he handed me this novel...er, enormous comic book. Over a thousand pages. Swollen members at every turn. Distasteful, thinly disguised rape fantasies relayed in striking detail. G-r-a-p-h-i-c violence. Garbl More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 16, 2011

Lauren rated it:

The first book in the totally epic Night's Dawn trilogy, Reality Dysfunction opens with a few hundred pages of set-up. Character introduction after character introduction occurs in settings which are painstakingly and lovingly described. At length. And then again. The elaborate setting of the stage is hard to get into at first, but readers willing to slug through the first half are rewarded by the execution of the ambitious plot.

Seriously, it's worth it. The Night's Dawn trilogy is arg More...

0 comments like

May 19, 2009

Epoch of Entropy rated it:

If you trying to decipher a bunch of techno-babble, without any initial explanation, that may or may not get clarified chapters into the book... This book may be for you.

This is what grandparents must feel like when hearing a casual discussion about how VOIP TCP/IP packets are prioritized with next generation networks using IPv6, and the potential social ramifications of packet filtering from ISPs who are owned by content providers.

Edit:
I would like to add that the More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 10, 2011

Cv rated it:

It's hard for me to give Hamilton an average grade on a book. Usually they are so well-written and compelling - true page turners. But in this case, even though the writing was strong I had much trouble getting interested; in fact I had as much trouble getting interested on page 1000 as I did on page 4.

The problem is that the entire book feels like background and setup with very little attention paid to plot or even strong characterization. It reads like a colossal history book for m More...

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Mar 13, 2011

Peter added it

Restored my faith: I stopped reading Sci-Fi a few years ago as I thought that most books were too shallow. Recently I read this trilogy, and I has reminded me why I liked the genre in the first place. Hamilton's books have great depth and believable characters, whilst at the same time having enough technology and detail to satisfy any die-hard SF fan.
The world Hamilton weaves is epic in scale, breathtakingly elegant in places, and almost primeval in others.
Although a long read, I would strongl More...

0 comments like

Jun 16, 2011

Johnny rated it:

In spite of the pyrotechnics of the space ambush and firefight between exotic ships that takes place on the incipient pages of The Reality Dysfunction, there was an emotional void to the action. I, personally, almost put the book down at that point and was ready to dismiss the whole work as another one of those successful genre products I’d never understand. One of my students raved about this trilogy and, indeed, gave me his copy after we’d talked about our favorite science-fiction and fantasy More...

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