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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Delivers what it promises, but nothing really new..., November 13, 2002
Here is one book that I am divided on. On the one hand, I can hardly claim to be disappointed since the book delivers exactly what is described. On the other hand, I am a little disappointed due to the nature of the book itself. The first thing to understand is that this is not a book of stories revolving around the "Night's Dawn" trilogy and its Future History. Rather this is basically a compendium of the people, technology, cultures, etc. of that Future History in a condensed format. That being said, all of this is available in the trilogy itself somewhere. It is not in the condensed format, granted, but it is in there. That, of course, is to be expected. However, there is really nothing extra that makes this book all that compelling of a buy. I am sure there are a few extra details here and the degree of satisfaction you will feel with those few extra details will depend entirely upon just how deeply you want to get into the Future History. If you are a person that has trouble getting into "space opera" type stories where there are many characters, cultures, and technologies, this book might help you make sense of it all beforehand rather than learning it piece-meal via reading through the "Night's Dawn" trilogy of books. However, if you are not that sort of person my guess is you will feel that you wasted your money. (Note: I am not saying you will feel cheated. As I said, the book gives what it promises.) I gave this three stars because it is an excellent compendium to the "Night's Dawn" trilogy but I kept the last two stars simply because nothing extra was really added for those fans who might have wanted a little more. If I had to make recommendations, I would say avoid this one and read the trilogy or "A Second Chance at Eden" (which is a collection of short stories and novellas dealing with the Future History).
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting But Not Critical, April 30, 2002
First off, only readers of Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" six-volume alleged trilogy need to pick this up. So don't get confused and buy this by mistake, thinking it's for "Star Wars" or something. Okay. When a compendium of this sort is put together, the author has to tread a fine line between blabbing out a wealth of details about every character, location, and event, or relating the barest minimum amount of information about same. If he or she takes the former tack, the assumption is that the reader has completed the epic series upon which the compendium is based and is interested in exploring the background of certain individuals or refreshing their memory about key incidents. In the latter case, the author assumes that the reader is still slogging through the series and is using the compendium to keep track of a huge cast of heroes and villains, so the disclosure of too much information would spoil the suspense. On the whole, I prefer cyclopedias that flood the reader with all manner of minutiae and that include stuff that couldn't be crammed into the series. Sadly for me, this handbook is not such a work. It's got a whole heck of a lot of data on the main planetary systems: Earth, Norfolk, Lalande, the Kulu Kingdom, New California, and so forth. This information includes whole wads of stuff on prominent flora and fauna, governmental systems, ethnic makeup of the population, and settlement history. There's also material on the alien races, and explanations of the Adamist and Edenist cultures. However, the character biographies are pretty sketchy for the main dozen or so characters, and the entries for the supporting cast are only three or four word descriptions, basically right out of the Dramatis Personae sections of the novels themselves. And such material as is provided is only up to the point of the beginning of the series, so if you want complete histories of what everyone went through in the course of the saga, you're out of luck. I was really hoping that this book would provide new insights or answer some questions (such as why Kelvin Solanki pretty much disappears forever, or why Ralph Hiltch feels he failed at the end, or the final disposition of Tolton or Kelly Tirrel or Erick Thakrar or the various secret agents). But it did not. The handbook, then, won't really help you figure out some of the big themes of the trilogy, but it's not a bad addition to Hamilton's body of work for the ardent fan.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Book of Spoilers, July 3, 2003
By A Customer
The Confederation Handbook is a companion volume to Hamilton's massive "Night's Dawn Trilogy", which was a trilogy in Britain, but not in the USA. It lays out the history and technology of the major cultures, discusses the planets on which the action of the trilogy occurs, and fills in a little background information. Why is it a book of spoilers? Much of Night's Dawn consists of going through a long series of adventures to find out the quirks of Hamilton's galaxy. It is the wealth and appeal of his background, and the daring of his conceit- scifi that overtly tackles all the issues usually left to religion-- that make "Night's Dawn" so popular. With this book you get in neat summary the information that would otherwise require you to read thousands of pages of the trilogy itself. Indeed, if you read the first volume of "Reality Dysfunction" and would like to know where the story goes, you have only to read this book, skip the next four and a half volumes, and read the last 100 pages of "Naked God", and you will have the plot. So this book can be considered the Cliff Notes version of "Night's Dawn". Readers who have read and learned all the information provided in the trilogy will find little new here. Since I had read the six volumes at different times, there were gaps in my knowledge, and this book was wonderful for filling those (somehow, I missed the part where he explained the cause of the reality dysfunction itself). So I enjoyed and profited from this Handbook. Please note that the one thing omitted from the "Handbook" is the Deus ex Machina ending of "The Naked God"; readers seeking more information about that phenomenon will be disappointed. Fans of "Night's Dawn" might want to buy this book as a reference work. It has handy sections on Voidhawk breeding, etc. Now you can make your own decision.
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