The Reality Dysfunction

Author: Peter F. Hamilton

As we keep saying, scale is one of the key features of space opera; after all, if you take the whole of the galaxy as your playground, you've got to think big. So it's hardly surprising that space opera has generated some very big books, and they don't come much bigger than Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy: well over a million words in three massive thousand-page volumes. Is it worth the time, and the wrist-ache, of reading them? You bet, because Peter Hamilton does epic stuff very well.Then three volumes, The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God, along with the short story collection, A Second Chance at Eden and the non-fiction The Confederation Handbook, cover a vast amount of space centuries from now. There are sentient space ships and sentient space cities, there are aliens, space navies, and there's a war against the dead who are returning, all of which make for a vivid and exciting account of our future in space. Why It Made the ListSpace opera should be epic, and with Peter Hamilton that's exactly what you get.Technically, I think this epic space opera tale also fits within the zombie genre, but somehow this has never been mentioned by any reviewers. Have we finally had our fill of zombie jokes? Am I flogging an (un)dead horse? Okay, I admit defeat. Peter F. Hamilton's novel is much fresher than my terrible zombie jokes: it's a new take on the space opera genre with all of the old-fashioned criteria: new technology, epic plots across the stars, massive spaceships, and entertaining baddies and heroes you want to gun for. But this novel really does tell the story of a "reality dysfunction" - a rip in the fabric of time that lets the dead possess living bodies. A Satanist, Quinn Dexter, takes control of his dead/sort of dead/kind of living/are they living or dead army and initiates the Night's Dawn: the decimation of everything on Earth. All is not doom and gloom, however, with Joshua Calvert and Syrinx using their spaceships to search for an alien God who just may hold the answer, if they can manage to find this mythical God in the stars before The Night's Dawn eats everything in existence.

Books in The Night's Dawn Series (2)

The Neutronium Alchemist

The Naked God

Similar Recommendations

Commonwealth Saga, Hyperion, The Expanse, Dune