Customer Reviews

Naked God (Nights Dawn Trilogy 3)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I really enjoyed two of Hamilton's recent books (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained), so I've been planning to read his "Night's Dawn Trilogy" for a while, due to the many positive reviews here. Problem was, it was released as six books back in the Nineties, and they were out of print. Last fall, Orbit republished the series as a trilogy of massive 1300-page doorstops. I dove in eagerly, hoping for a good, long story. Two months and nearly 4000 pages later, I'm finally done. My main impression? Good, but much too long. There's at least a whole third that should have been left out; the entire Neutronium Alchemist thread has nothing to do with the rest of the story. So, right there, the trilogy could have easily lost 1000 pages or so and been a stronger tale for it. As for the remaining 3000-page story, here are my thoughts. (This review treats all three books as one long story. It can't be read any other way.)

The reading of this thing took so long, and I invested so much time in it, it was almost like a small relationship: at first, NDT seemed like a good, meaty space opera, and captured my interest. Hamilton is an excellent writer, with some faults, but he's good enough to make you overlook them. The book began as a standard sf novel, taking pains to sound authoritative and scientifically accurate. But then it suddenly veered off into Stephen King territory, which totally threw me. I had bought all three volumes, was hundreds of pages in, and suddenly I'm reading a story about possession, ghosts, and human sacrifice, along with FTL travel and galactic empires. I opted to see it through, despite some grave (no pun intended) misgivings. I wanted to see how Hamilton managed to explain, in a scientific way, how the "beyond" (purgatory, to you and me) worked. So I kept going.

This is one of British writer Hamilton's first books, and it's very British. Planets have names like Norfolk, towns are named Durringham, people have names like Kingsley Prior. I can only imagine that, in his early work, Hamilton didn't imagine he'd have readers outside the Realm. (His later books aren't so provincial.) It's part of Hamilton's Point, I think, that despite 600 hundred years of scientific progress, mankind is still employing the same economic--and cultural--model. The events in the book make people question that their way of life by the end, and that's the Point. Problem is, it isn't until you reach page 3500 or so that you realize he's deliberately painted a picture of a future that still has people saying "jolly good!" and "fab." At first, I thought he was just being lazy or imaginative. But there is a Point. You've just got to hang in there to see that. So suspend your critical thinking when you read about "arcologies" (domed cities on Earth built in response to climatic and ecological disaster), a planet where it may as well be the Green and Pleasant Land of the 1800's, and everyone talks as though they were from the early 21st century.

Our main hero is Joshua Calvert, a Han Solo-type of guy who's hard not to like. I would like to see the story rewritten as Joshua's story. This would've made it much stronger as a story, for one thing. As it is, the story is told from so many points of view, it's impossible to keep them all straight. There's literally a cast of hundreds here. Many of these people are not very likable, either, nor worth spending time with. This story (and its Point) would benefit from a good, strong moral main character, and while Joshua does evolve and grow during the course of the novel, he's off-camera too much, and we don't really get inside his head enough. His "conversion", therefore, is a bit unconvincing. He starts out as young guy (early 20's) exploring space ruins to make a buck. His goal is to finance the refitting of his dead father's starship, the (what else?) 'Lady Macbeth'. He makes a big strike, the Lady Mac is quickly up and running, and suddenly, without training or experience, Joshua is the hottest pilot in the universe. (Okay, fine, it's a story and we know our demographic...) Girls fall all over our hero (again, the demographic), and he's not much more throughout the book than The Guy We All Wish We Were. Hamilton could've made him more than just a cavalier space jockey, and focused the story on him more. Things get interesting when he interacts with Ione, the human symbiont of a major habitat. The girl Hamilton focuses on, however is Louise, who comes from Planet England (Norfolk). She's a spoiled aristocratic brat and I didn't like her.

The one really interesting sf idea Hamilton describes is the cultural divide between the Edenists and the Adamists. (Where these terms come from, he never explains.) Edenists have adopted bitek, which is biological technology. Space habitats are grown from a seed, and are sentient. They are mated with a human in a symbiotic relationship. Edenist starships (called voidhawks) are similar. Edenists share a telepathic communications link with all other Edenists called affinity. The rest of humanity (the Adamists) reject bitek and affinity, though everyone has a nanotech interface installed which performs much the same function as affinity. Why the Adamists reject bitek is never explained (as far as I could tell, and I was looking), and this is weakness in the book.

Though Hamilton is a good writer, his pacing needs work. As I said, this book needs to be a lot shorter. But Hamilton doesn't seem to know how to abbreviate or summarize. Everything is shown in detail, in real time. Some heavy editing would have helped here. For example, every time a spacecraft begins or ends a flight, we are told how it deploys or retracts its "thermo dump panels." Every. Single. Time. The mechanics of things take on too much importance, overshadowing the story and the characters. Even battles are described in mechanistic detail, enumerating exactly how many of each type of weapon, how much force an explosion generated. Do we really need to know how many beds that barracks holds? And that the bathroom is communal? Massive detail and describing every event does not result in verisimilitude; it just makes for a long, drawn-out story.

The future seems so much like our present. Perhaps Hamilton was trying to make a point (i.e., humanity has stagnated), but it isn't until the last 100 pages that the reader is let in on the Point, and the reason for the stagnation. There is an awful lot of time spent on Norfolk, but the aristocratic society seems to be shown in, if anything, a favorable light. Louise slowly comes to learn how her idyllic life has been built upon the toiling backs of others, but Norfolk is not like most of the Confederation. Perhaps Hamilton thought it would make his point by being so extreme, but because I didn't know what his point was till the very end, it just seemed like he thought it was cool to have a world that was like jolly old England.

Though many reviewers seem to be unhappy with his ending, I thought it was consistent, though rather weak. Hamilton has a message to deliver, having to do with our evolution as a race, and how the fortunate and well-off have a responsibility to the less-fortunate. A rather liberal message, though a bit simplistic. I would have liked the story much better if Hamilton hadn't gone off the science-based rails. I don't like horror, for one thing, and this book spends a lot of time being a horror story. The metaphysics of possession were completely unconvincing to me, and I read through those sections just waiting for them to be over. No scientific basis for Hamilton's purgatory is ever offered, either. He seems to expect his readers to accept the possibility of souls, purgatory, and an afterlife (of the Frank Tipler Omega Point variety, but still). I'm guessing that, because it's "space opera" and not "hard sf," somehow it's okay to throw in metaphysical hogwash. Perhaps the marketing folks thought it would have more appeal with some horror thrown in. Didn't work for me. I would have enjoyed a more believable, realistic enemy or conflict. Instead Hamilton gives us a parody of Al Capone and a low-life cardboard cutout named Quinn Dexter running around zapping people with "energistic" beams of white fire. I nearly gave up on the book several times in disgust.

The book in a nutshell: The watershed event in our civilization comes 600 years from now when a freak event occurs (an alien species, by some arcane, unclear process, somehow opens a channel up, allowing souls in Purgatory to begin possessing living humans). Then, at the end, a nearly omnipotent entity gives Our Hero unlimited powers, and he puts all to rights in about five pages. So the beginning of the conflict and its resolution are both deus ex machina. Something miraculous happens which sets off a 4000-page chain of events, and we read about every single one of those events, in detail. Then, something miraculous happens once more, ending the conflict. In the end, it turns out that the pressure to change things comes about because people realize that souls are ending up in purgatory (the "beyond") because society hasn't given them a fair chance to develop their potential. Say what?

Conclusion: Hamilton writes like an engineer obsessed with how his machinery operates. At the detail level, it's all very interesting and convincing. It's when you look up from the nuts and bolts (and thermo dump panels) you realize the overall story is a flimsy construction. If you don't mind your science fiction mixed with second-rate horror/fantasy, with a dash of sophomoric social philosophy, then I'd say go for it. And be prepared for a long, slow ride.

I liked the first book a lot, especially the first half of the first book. Like many reviewers, I bought all 3 at once, and plowed thru. All in all, I liked the trilogy except for the ending, although there were a number of weak points.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

The main problem for me is how cheap, fast, and rudely he ends this book and the trilogy. After reading 3400 pages, and tracking 4 or 5 main plot lines that you just KNOW are destined to all meet up in some amazing conclusion: they don't.

All the way along you have various heroes and heroines exhibiting courage, cleverness, and determination to win the 'little' battles in their plotline. You just KNOW somehow, by winning some of those battles that lesser folks would have surely lost, it will somehow contribute to winning the overall 'war'. They don't.

Halfway thru this last book in the trilogy, I started thinking: Whoa, he BETTER hurry up and start converging these plots! He's running out of pages to bring all of this together! When I was 3/4 thru and there was NO converging in sight, I started to get confused: What? Is there a 4th book that ties this all up? When I was 9/10 thru and STILL no converging, my heart was sinking. Then in the last 10 pages of the 3rd monster book of the trilogy, literally a miracle happens. Than a few paragraphs are written on each plotline, showing how all is well for the good guys, and how the bad guys all got their just desserts.

Bottom Line: I felt like the author just got tired of writing this series, and wrapped it up as fast as he possibly could.

This is the final book in his Night's Dawn Trilogy. I really enjoyed the scope of worlds and characters he created and the universe he put them in. He is able to do a great job bringing them all together. You'll obviously want to read the first two books first - The Reality Dysfunction and The Neutronium Alchemist. As a bonus if you are looking at this for the Kindle search for 'The Night's Dawn Trilogy' and you can get all 3 books together for $7.99.

This is the third and final book in Hamilton's three volume Night's Dawn trilogy, a 3,600 page behemoth to be sure. These are not stand alone novels and must be read not only in sequence, but in continuous, quick succession if you hope to keep on top of the various story threads.

I must say, that while I initially enjoyed this work immensely, the novelty and the outstanding hard science fiction concepts and practices began to wear a little thin after about 2,000 pages. Such things as medical and neural nanonics, anti-matter fuel and weaponry, Edenism, sentient habitats and space craft, human possession, non-human species (xenoc) and the various political subdivisions and splinter groups, while captivating for a time, ultimately become second nature. At that point, only the underlying story can support the reader's attention. While I was not in any way disappointed, as I said, by the time I finished the third book, two months after picking up the first (reading an hour or two every day) I was ready to be done with it.

About a third of the way through this final installment, I felt that several of the threads began to take bizarre, and at times ridiculous, turns (Mortonridge disappearance, Valisk dimension shift, to name a couple). I suspect that this could have been a perfectly satisfactory, three volume, 2,000 page story without some of the more extreme twists and turns that quite frankly detracted from my enjoyment of the experience. Glad I read it; glad it's over.

This series is an EPIC!! This is the conclusion of adventures that span the galaxy and have contact with dozens of other worlds and cultures. It was a story that captured my interest from the beginning. The characters are believable, and interesting. The author has created an entire universe that will captivate your imagination. Try it, you'll be hooked.

The Confederation is in turmoil. The possessed are running amok throughout Human space...even gaining a foothold in the arcologies of Humanity's cradle, Earth. Joshua Calvert and Syrinx set off in their respective ships on a last ditch mission, to seek out the alien Tyrathca's Sleeping God, believing it may hold the key to solving the possession crisis...

Meanwhile, Quinn Dexter has something else entirely in mind. Instead of moving a particular Confederation world outside of the Universe to separate it from the keening calls of the souls in the beyond, he intends to bring forth the Night using the powers of the possessed. But what Quinn Dexter is trying to release should never be free, and may doom all of Humanity...

The Naked God culminates Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy in a fitting fashion. Yes, there were some flaws...he went a tad heavy on the deus ex machina...but that isn't really what irked me...and was indeed, somewhat appropriate. Without going into too much detail, his solution to Humanity's possession crisis was a bit overly hokey. Nonetheless, Hamilton tied off his myriad of threads with his myriad of characters in a fairly satisfying way...no small feat given how many characters Hamilton birthed in this saga. I look forward to picking up more stories by Hamilton in the future.

I loved the Nights Dawn series from start to ... just before the ending. Wonderful series full of detail, interesting characters and plot twists. I read it after I read his Commonwealth series and was not disappointed in the slightest. Until the very end of the book. The ending is by far the worst use of a Deus Ex Machina that I've ever seen - a 3000 page epic is wrapped up in like 10 pages. All problems solved, all loose ends tied up, through a plot device which basically has no other purpose except to fix everything.

If you think that will piss you off, then you probably shouldn't start the series in the first place. But since I enjoyed 99% of it, I still highly recommend it as long as you can be content with such an unsatisfying ending.

Being a devoted science fiction fan, I have to say that this is one of the best series I have ever read. I could not put the book down. Yes the ending was fairy tale like, but it was a great ending- happy end - to a more than 3000 pages long story.

This entire series will knock you on your butt. INcredible characters, unique story and plotline, kickass writing, superb storytelling, this series has it all.

What I love the best is that you have absolutely no idea what is going to happen next. This series literally keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire way.

In a nutshell, this story has it all. Great fight scenes, great drama, wonderful characters, amazing worldbuilding. This is the type of book/series that all authors should strive for.

Having read all three parts to this sci-fi trilogy over the course of a single week it left me breathless with the sheer scale of the author's achievement. Epic in scale, thought-provoking in content, operatic in its stage, this is a trilogy that rightly lays claim to Peter F Hamilton's being cited as Britain's Best Sci-Fi writer.
Whilst the levels of social engineering are complex if you strip it all away the premise is simple:
What would happen if humankind discovered irrefutably that death was not the final state and how would we react to both that fact and dealing with the returning souls of our past?
Hamilton's ability to provide us with a future vision of humanity that retains our darkest fears and greatest frailties coupled with his skill in provisioning us with realistic future technologies and social development is akin to the visionary writings of Asimov and Clarke.
The main players of this space opera are numerous, but, as we follow the Han Solo-esque Joshua Calvert who's rakish panache secures the love of two utterly different and complex women - the great Tranquility Lord of Ruin, Ione Saldana and the rural innocence that belies the steel of Louise Kavanagh - we find ourselves rushing from epic interstellar space wars to apocalyptic rituals, from heady sensuality to hard-nosed science, from alien societies to human grasping with a deft turn of the page that means Hamilton's work is not just to be lauded for its sheer scale, but also his ability to create a story full of pathos and danger, humanity and darkness. His exploration of the afterlife, his brilliant creation of Al Capone's return to the universe and all it encapsulates, his creation of Edenism, of the void/black/hellhawks, of nanonics, of everything that makes a human galactic presence function asks questions and gives plausible answers that not only make this a brilliant story but a thought-provoking one.
You may get to the final words of this and disagree on the ending, or crave more, but, like it or loathe it, its creator can be proud of his creation because it is quite simply stunning.
Read it.