{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2780",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2780,
    "subject": "Hamiliton's \"Night's Dawn\" Trilogy",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-08-15T15:42:33+00:00",
    "last": "2001-08-15T15:42:33+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0631@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Nigel Price",
        "address": "nigel.a.price at virgin.net"
      },
      "date": "2001-08-15T15:42:33+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Hamiliton's \"Night's Dawn\" Trilogy",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "How's that for timing?\n\nI've just got back from holiday in France, where I finally finished \"The\nNaked God\", the third and final volume of Peter F. Hamilton's wonderful\n\"Night's Dawn\" trilogy. The whole time I was reading it, I was thinking, \"I\nwonder whether I should mention this book on the Urth list?\" After all, the\nseries deals with so many of the themes that Wolfe has dealt with over the\nyears, but is so utterly, utterly different in its style and treatment from\nanything Wolfe ever has written or probably ever would write.\n\nI thought that the books might be of interest to some of you, and wondered\nwhat fellow Lupines would make of the whole thing. Then I got back yesterday\nand started reading through my e-mail, and found that the topic had already\nbeen raised on the list.\n\nOK, it seems it is all right to mention Hamilton here, so here goes!\n\n\n* Warning! Mild spoilers ahead! *\n\n\nTo start at the beginning: \"Night's Dawn\" is a single if highly discursive\nnovel in three huge volumes. These are called:\n\n    The Reality Dysfunction (1996)\n    The Neutronium Alchemist (1997)\n    The Naked God (1999)\n\nIn the UK paperback edition, \"Night's Dawn\" is over 3,600 pages long, so\nthat even the individual volumes consist of over 1,200 pages each. I\nunderstand that the US editions are slightly differently divided to those\npublished here in the UK, so you need to make sure you read a uniform\nedition from whichever country you source your reading matter from.\n\nThere's also a fourth, related, volume of short stories called \"A Second\nChance at Eden\" (1998). These stories are set in the same universe as\n\"Night's Dawn\", although they take place before the events recounted in\nthe longer work.\n\nNot to give away too much at this stage, the plot of \"Night's Dawn\" is set\nin the late 26th century and concerns the discovery that souls have a real,\nphysical existence and retain their individual identity even after death,\nalbeit in another, parallel, dimension. This dimension, \"the beyond\", is a\nplace of continual torment and suffering. Through a convoluted set of\ncircumstances, the souls of the dead regain access to the physical universe,\nwhere they can live again if they possess the bodies of living persons. This\nthey do with malicious enthusiasm, exploiting their residual connection with\nthe beyond and the \"potential difference\" (my terminology) between the two\nrealms not only to possess the living but also to wield extensive\n\"energistic powers\" (Hamilton's terminology!) which allow them to mould\nappearance and, to a certain extent, reality, to their whim and fancy. They\ncommand considerable firepower in the form of bolts of white fire and can,\nwhen there are enough of them of one mind and in the same physical place,\nmove whole planets into alternate dimensions.\n\nStylistically, \"Night's Dawn\" is a glorious farrago of sub-genres, mixing\nhard SF and space opera (space grand opera, indeed!) with out-and-out horror\nand dark fantasy. The whole thing shouldn't really work at all, but does,\nsplendidly, making the dislocations between genre expectations a central\npart of the story. This is, indeed, part of the \"reality dysfunction\"\ndescribed in the title of the first volume.\n\nIt is also one example of the ways in which Hamilton is similar to Wolfe but\nutterly different. In many of his works, and pre-eminently in the\nNew-Long-Short-Sun cycle, Wolfe writes in that mixture of science fiction\nand fantasy which, as a convenient shorthand, we may call science fantasy.\nHe uses the collision between the genres with great subtlety to explore\nissues of theology and psychology, providing quasi-scientific rationales for\nreligious phenomena and using naturalistically described, albeit often\nscience-fictional, events to provide symbolic types for key events in\nChristian sacred history. In Wolfe, reality continually appears to \"explain\naway\" the theological while inescapably evoking it symbolically, even as\nsufficient uncertainty is generated for the miraculous to remain a clear\npossibility.\n\nHamilton is an altogether less subtle author. His strong suits are plot and\nexcitement, and I really ought to stress that the main reason for reading\n\"Night's Dawn\" is that it is the most wonderful page turner. The vast\npanoply of parallel plots and subplots zip along at an astonishing rate, and\nthere are all sorts of breathless escapes and cliff-hanging last minute\nrescues. I am full of admiration for the way that Hamilton holds the whole\nthing together, meshing the different story lines and making a coherent\nwhole out of so many different narratives.\n\nI should add too that the baroque range of high technology on display is\nsimply gorgeous, and, in so far as a layman like myself can tell, the\ncopious astronomical and astrophysical details bandied about are accurate\nand convincing.\n\nWhile many of the minor characters are straight from central casting, the\nmain actors in the story are strongly and clearly depicted, and there is\neven plenty of sly humour scattered about, much of it highly satirical.\nThere are some interesting sub-themes going on, too, particularly looking at\nthe father-daughter relationship, a topic in which Hamilton seems especially\ninterested (see, too, the disturbing story \"Candy Buds\" in \"A Second Chance\nat Eden\").\n\n(Completely off topic, but what do other people make of Hamilton's take on\nrace relations? As he makes clear in the story \"New Days Old Times\" in \"A\nSecond Chance at Eden\", he is not optimistic that Earth's different peoples\ncan ever get along together, even when given the additional elbow room of\nnew planets and habitats to live in. Given the grim stories in the daily\nnews, it's hard to say that he's wrong, but his fictional solution, ethnic\nstreaming in Earth's planetary emigration policy, seems to smack of\napartheid and the old South African doctrine of \"separate development\".\nUnlike many other aspects and injustices of the interstellar society he\ndepicts, this policy does not seem to come in for either direct or indirect\nauthorial criticism. Indeed, it allows Hamilton to exploit some mild\nnational stereotyping in his portrayal of some characters, which, even just\nsticking to a literary point of view, seems a little lazy. Guiltily, I have\nto admit, however, that I did enjoy his humorous revenge on the country\nwhich inflicted \"Neighbours\" on us in his ghastly-but-funny portrayal of the\ngullible Australian teenagers who, as if straight from the script of that\negregiously awful antipodean soap opera, get taken in by the advertising\ncampaign mounted by the evil dead who are taking over the Valisk space\nhabitat. I am also ashamed to admit that I enjoyed the comic chauvinism\nevident in Hamilton's account of the misadventures of the evil gallic space\npirate, Andre Duchamp, who blames all the ills on the future on \"those evils\nAnglos\"...)\n\nBut, even with everything else that is going on, Hamilton does tackle some\nof the Big Issues. He ponders on the nature of the soul and even gives\nscience fictional versions of purgatory, heaven and hell. The main\nsocio-political groupings of humanity are Edenists and Adamists, and the\nstory ends with the heroine confronting the devil (all right, a devil) and\nthe hero finding god (oh, all right, a sort of god, but I'm not saying any\nmore at this stage). There is much less ambiguity than in Wolfe, and the\nscience fantasy is much less stable, tending to dissolve into a science\nfictional rationale rather than maintaining an enigmatic equilibrium between\nthe imperatives of science and religion. Hamilton's mysticism has a\ndistinctly humanistic flavour, and ultimately turns out to have an\negalitarian and even a mildly socialist agenda. He is extremely good,\nthough, at posing and answering the question, \"So what happens after that?\"\nThe three volumes are devoted to such questions as, what happens after\ndeath? What happens when a star dies? What happens after a civilisation\ndestroys itself in war? What happens after you've escaped to another\ndimension? What happens after the universe collapses in on itself? All in\nall, this willingness to extend narrative after what in other contexts would\nbe the end is one of the major reasons why \"Night's Dawn\" is so\ninteresting - and so long.\n\nAn almost final note: Hamilton seems to have read every major space opera\nand SF book of the past few years, and watched all the most prominent SF and\nhorror films and TV shows too. He gleefully includes every scene, theme and\ncliché you can think of somewhere in his own work, often acknowledging the\ntheft with an overt reference to some key word or episode in the original,\njust to let you know that he knows you know what he's doing. You'll find all\nyour favourites here, from \"Childhood's End\" to \"The Exorcist\" to\n\"Ringworld\". (Bizarrely, even \"The Godfather\" gets a look in.) Iain M Banks\nhas clearly been a major influence, and the opening chapter, with its\noverwhelming techno-jargon and hyper-destructive space weaponry, is written\nas an amusing homage to E E \"Doc\" Smith as rewritten by Iain Banks (c.f. the\nopening space battle in Banks'  \"Excession\"), as pastiched by Peter\nHamilton.\n\nWhile others might want to track down, for example, the nice little C J\nCherryh pastiche, or the multiple borrowings from the already eclectic\n\"Babylon 5\", for us devoted Lupophiles, the principle interest in this\nspot-the-reference festival is, of course, tracking down homages to our own\nfavourite author. While the vast cylindrical space habitats such as\nTranquillity, with their centrally suspended axial light tubes, will\ninevitably remind us of the Long Sun Whorl, what about the business of the\nsuspected \"secret metamorph aborigines\" on pages 224-225 of the standard UK\npaperback edition of \"The Reality Dysfunction\". An allusion to \"The Fifth\nHead of Cerberus\" or what?\n\nA final, final note. How can anyone resist a book where the heroine lives at\na place called Cricklade? The real Cricklade is about five miles down the\nroad from where I live. Sadly, the real Cricklade doesn't evoke L P Hartley\nin quite the way that the fictional one does (OK, there's another homage for\nyou - \"The Go-Between\"), and, even more sadly, none of the locals are quite\nas lovely as the delightful Louise Kavanagh, but I thought that you might be\ninterested to know that the next village to the south of the real Cricklade\nis called Latton. Not quite the same spelling as the character in the book,\nbut an interesting coincidence even so.\n\nNigel\nMinety, Wiltshire\nUK"
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