Every Day's a Cold Day in Hell...

A friend at work just turned me onto the Night's Dawn series of hard-SF novels written by Peter F. Hamilton. It's an epic saga in the grand tradition of works like Frank Herbert's classic Dune Chronicles, with a sweep and scope that amazes me. The paperback editions which my buddy is loaning me, one book at a time (because I'd likely herniate myself by trying to carry them all home at once), actually constitute parts of a "trilogy of pairs": each story of the trio would be around 1200 pages as a single book, so they've been split into Part 1 and Part 2. The series kicks off with The Reality Dysfunction 1: Emergence and The Reality Dysfunction 2: Expansion. I'm now in the midst of Part 1 of the second installment of the broader trilogy, The Neutronium Alchemist 1: Consolidation.

In some ways, this series reminds me of the "Golden Age" works of writers like Asimov, Clark, and Heinlein. There are a lot of big ideas woven into this fictional world, and Hamilton clearly knows his science. But what fascinates me about the Night's Dawn universe is its unique blend of physics and metaphysics, science and religion... a juxtaposition that's extremely difficult to pull off.

<spoiler>SPOILER ALERT:As the series kicks off, a member of an incorporeal alien species that specializes in observing other civilizations blunders upon a murder - actually, a Satanic rite - on a remote human colony planet. When this alien observes the spirit of the victim retreating to an alternate dimension, it attempts to follow. In the process, it inadvertently creates a rift that allows the tormented souls from this other dimension to escape back into the universe from which they came, unleashing drastic consequences for the "normal" humans who blunder into the path of the escapees.</spoiler>

This is where Hamilton interweaves elements not normally combined in hard SF. The entities from this other universe turn out to be the lost souls of dead humans, trapped for centuries (or millennia) in a place where they float, insensate, among other damned spirits. They have been driven to the brink of insanity (or beyond) by their desperate hunger for sensation, for life; they can observe the events of the "normal" human universe from which they came, but only dimly, through a translucent veil that leaves them more and more frantic to taste the lives that hover forever beyond their reach.

The spirits of the dead imprisoned in this alternate dimension are crippled by the constant, unquenchable temptation of the human world they can voyeuristically observe but never touch, never truly experience. Some were irreparably damaged before their deaths and exile to this cold, dark void; others still cling to slivers of their old morality and sense of duty. But all are so haunted by their traumatic memories of incarceration in this other realm that they are willing to do anything - anything - to avoid going back. And the only way to avoid that dismal fate is to hijack the bodies of the humans who still live, to possess and rape the souls of the innocent. By occupying flesh-and-blood humans, but still retaining their connection to the other dimension, they're able to funnel immense energies and reshape the reality of the material world to which they've returned.

That's the magic, the mystery, and the moral challenge of these novels. Few SF series can combine hard science and psychology in such a compelling way. If your psyche were trapped in solitary confinement (or in a sensory deprivation chamber as vast as an entire universe) for centuries or longer, how much of your sanity would survive? And, if you were offered a chance to live again at the expense of other living humans, by stealing their bodies and their futures, what atrocities would you willingly commit to maintain control?

I'm less than half way through this series but I'm hooked. I can't way to see how events play out. Peter Hamilton shows us, in these novels, that true hell is not fire and brimstone; instead, it's a dark, frigid, insensate place where tortured spirits yearn for one more smell, taste, touch of the world they've lost.

In this twisted reversal of the Rapture where the dead repossess our universe six centuries from now, technology has advanced, but the human condition is much the same. People are just as capable of cruelty and depravity as ever. Every day is a cold day in Hell. No wonder the resurgent spirits of the damned prefer to wield white fire and burn the vulnerable worlds of humanity to ashes before they'll allow themselves to be cast into the icy void again.