Customer Reviews

The Reality Dysfunction: Emergence & Expansion

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Oh my gosh...This is the most difficult work of Hamilton's I have read to date to get started in. Up front, I have not finished the works yet.

Absolutely loved Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. Read them twice, a year apart and even got my wife to read them. She is not a science fiction fan, and found the science a little overwhelming and underwhelming, that is, she likes a good story without the technical jargon which threatened to derail her read of them. Ultimately, she stuck it out, got the characters straight, and fell into the story, hook, line, and sinker.

I would not expect her to stick it out through the first quarter of this two part saga.

On the otherhand, now that I have, I am just as thrilled to pick it up, again and again, as I was with PS and JU.

This just hits me as the most enthralling SF I have ever read, and I have shelves of the stuff. I have found that I don't care much for short reads, I just can't sink my teeth into them. Hamilton's Space Operas will keep you entertained for weeks, if not months, (relative to life style).

If you buy this work, and find you are having some level of difficulty staying with the first two hundred pages, I feel confident saying that your efforts will be well rewarded as you read the next 600.

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This is an amazing grab-bag of a book. Written in multi-viewpoint
best-seller style, it features Adamists & Edenists (think Mechanist-
Shaper Lite), sentient bitek starships & habitats, prisoners transported
to primitive worlds, Secrets of the Ancients in the Ruin Ring, a
young and very sexy Lord of Ruin, a Stephen King twist for the
villains... what have I missed? The electrically-powered sidewheel
paddleboats? The Star Kingdom of Kulu? There aren't many
features of modern big-scale space opera that aren't stuck in
here somewhere. I'm not even going to try for a plot summary,
beyond that the civilized universe is in danger from Terrifying
Ancient Mysteries. I should warn you that the ending of Part 1 (of 3) [1] is
abrupt; this isn't a stand-alone book.

RD is written in a cozy British style that sometimes grated a bit on
these American eyes, and the sprawling, multi-threaded story line
lost me once or twice, but none of this really matters - if you like Big
space opera, you'll love "The Reality Dysfunction".
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[1] -- This is the "Night's Dawn" trilogy, originally published in the UK in 3 vols, it was reprinted
in the US as 6 (!) fat paperbacks.

Happy reading--
Pete Tillman
review written in 1997