Book Review: The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton

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Book Review: The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton

This is a very BIG story. I don’t just mean this (1225 page) book either since its part one of The Night’s Dawn Trilogy. I don’t just mean the trilogy is big either. The scope of the story is huge. The number of characters involved is large and the ideas aren’t exactly small either.

Its hard to summarise a book of this size and nature. There are a number of plot threads running throughout the book. Only one of them could really be described as resolved by the time you read the last page. The closest thing to a main character is Joshua Carver, an exceptionally clever, lucky and good looking individual (don’t you hate him already?) who’s primary aims are first to earn enough money to refit his father’s ship and secondly to get into bed with every half decent woman he can find.

However, to concentrate on any individual character would be to miss a central point about this book. Its not about an individual or even a group of individuals. Its about the human race and how it deals with the crisis that developes over the course of this book.

In order to do this Hamilton flits about from character to character and planet to planet. We see situations from many different viewpoints and sometimes characters disappear for hundreds of pages before reappearing. This could be a real mess. But its not. And its a testament to Peter F. Hamilton’s writing skill that the pages fly by and I remained thoroughly engrossed throughout.

All of the primary characters are drawn in interesting detail as are many many secondary characters. In fact given the size of the story its not always clear which are primary and secondary. People are selfish, arrogant, opinionated, and frequently wrong. They are also occasionally heroic despite themselves and generally human.

The universe that Hamilton constructs for these characters is equally fascinating. Its packed to the brim with intriguing concepts and technologies from the Edenist’s bitek habitats and “affinity gene” to the superweapon the Alchemist and on to the Reality Dysfunction itself. This is an internally consistent and convincing world which is suddenly plunged into chaos.

So what is the “Reality Dysfunction”? Well by the end of the book you still won’t be entirely sure. Its initial manifestations are a strange pink cloud and the ability for the dead to possess living people. This book really just sets up the puzzle to be answered in the next two volumes, but I guarantee that by the time you’ve read it you’ll be more than happy to read two more books of this quality.