Customer Reviews

The Night's Dawn Trilogy

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Very impressed with this Kindle release, well organized with an easy to use table of contents. The story itself is still amazing ten years later and now I don't need to carry around 3 HUGE hardcovers. One of the best values on Amazon, less than $8 for several thousand pages of epic space opera. Highly recommended.

I love this Trilogy and was all happy when I saw it on the kindle store. But then the dissapointment of it not being availble to my country?? Whats the deal Amazon? get this back so we can read it on our Kindle!!! 5 Stars for the Story -5 stars for it not being on the kindle anymore!

The story is quite original and good. However, the Kindle version is replete with formatting errors that are a constant distraction: spelling, punctuation, improperly broken-up dialogue paragraphs, words that have a hyphen in the middle because the print version is hyphenated at the end of a line of text, and inconsistent breaks whenever the story shifts location / character / time.

Here are three giant books (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God) for less than $8US. Impossible to publish as a single volume on paper, if you've ever seen any one of those three, you'll know they are very thick books. (In fact, you can find them each split into two parts, from Amazon on paper). A huge amount of reading pleasure awaits you - Peter F. Hamilton is a brilliant SF author, and this Trilogy is a masterwork. If you have any interest in SF and you have not yet read any of his work, this is your lucky day!
This epic defines a complex universe, with multiple alien races, differing human societies, a delightful web of intrigue and interstellar conflict. The wonderful human (and not so human) heroes and tragically evil villains play against a breathtaking, rapidly changing backdrop of star systems, asteroid belts, living biteck starships, primitive colonies and awe-inspiring living habitats.
Be warned! You'll lose a lot of sleep, and regret not a second of it.

Just look at most of the reviews here, and you'll see that this is a really fun series of books to read. I can't add to that.

However, I find that this title bricks my Kindle about once an hour. I don't know if it's a problem specific to this book, or if it's a problem with all very long texts, but the further I get into this title, the more frequently my Kindle completely locks up. I can't page forward, page backwards, access the menu, etc. Frequently I can't even turn my Kindle off. Generally after a minute of pushing buttons, the Kindle will reset itself, throwing me out of the book entirely. When I re-access the book, I am taken back many pages. Fortunately, I have learned to memorize the specific page I am on as soon as this happens.

This is a 5-star book in a 3-star format.

Fiction Rating: 4/5 stars
Kindle Edition Rating: 2.5/5 stars

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I did not expect the depth nor length of this book. While it is three books, I've found it reads as wonderfully if considered a single book, so at a combined 3,684 pages, the $8US spent on this was by far the best literary "bang for my buck" I've experienced--and experience I did.

While the Hamilton does fall into the "long book pacing trap" on occasion, and the Kindle edition does contain a number of typographic anomalies (usually print-version hyphenation that was left in, the inability to process type symbols correctly, especially during the "French" narratives and the odd formatting on affinity dialog), the fact that I'm still reading it after 2,200 pages is a testament to how the story has gripped me.

If you are a lover of science fiction and philosophy, I recommend at least giving it a chance. Add to the fact that with the Kindle edition you won't need to lug around three heavy tomes, and you'll be able to slip away into the world of the Confederation, Edenists and the Possessed (along with the myriad of other races, species and personalities living within the pages.

I have just about finished the first of this huge trilogy, and am quite enjoying it, but the formatting errors are a legitimate distraction. Lots of misplaced hyphens, weird spacing, and the like that do interrupt the flow of the book cost this a star. If you like expansive SF and don't mind a little bawdiness in your fiction, this may be for you - the value can't be beaten, and I like Hamilton's writing style and incredibly deep universe, I just wish the Kindle edition hadn't gotten the proofreading version of the bum's rush...

The first few chapters require you to indulge Hamilton, but when the series gets out of space and onto a planet - you better hold on to your f'n hat. The sex is just a little more graphic than the violence, so if that's not your thing ... give it a shot anyway - the naughty parts will fly right past you. I did have to skip some parts, but there is so much to read, it's not a big deal.

If the people who formatted the book for the kindle are reading this, please take a moment to look at your work on the kindle itself. The datavising and affinity conversations are insufficiently punctuated, making them often very difficult to follow.

Certainly worth the under-ten-dollars price I paid for it, however!

The first chapter of this epic hooked me, as it contained one the most well thought out and believable space battles that I've ever read. I really enjoy hard sci-fi that really gets down into the nitty gritty of the principles the author uses to build their universe, and I was not disappointed here. The descriptions of future technologies and spaceflight and other sentient creatures are so detailed and internally consistent that I rarely had to suspend my disbelief. Mix that with the grand arching plotline filled with high adventure and unique characters, and you have one of my new favorite sci-fi series.

The only warning I would give about these books is that they contain a lot of sexuality, which could be offensive. I'm definitely no prude, but I was taken aback by the carnal content of the trilogy. It didn't reduce my enjoyment of the books, but there was enough to make it stand out as a possible issue.

Peter Hamilton creates amazingly complex, serpentine stories that have a scope which exceeds just about anything I've ever read. Trying to synopsize this 4,000+ page trilogy just isn't possible - it's space opera on a grand scale, and he generally does an excellent job making the story compelling. I did however, have a couple of real issues with this trilogy. First and foremost - the cheesy, deux ex machina ending (and I mean that in the literal sense) where he wraps up all the disparate narratives in the last 50 pages through a fairly ridiculous and flimsy plot contrivance. Second - not every single landscape, location, and irrelevant widget requires pages of detailed description. Although I can appreciate the author's creativity in terms of the worlds he's created and the detail in which he envisions his settings, there is an enormous level of superfluous verbiage in this book. A little judicious editing would have cut this book down materially without detracting from the story at all. Finally, while the scope of this book is vast, and includes a huge cast of characters dealing with some really interesting philosophical issues (e.g., the continued existence of an immortal soul after death, and a "beyond" where some of these souls reside), the description of these characters and treatment of these issues is completely superficial. Unlike his prolix descriptions of just about everything else - his characters are generic (e.g., the fearless, handsome and uber-competent spaceship captain, the precocious and spunky 10 year-old who is wise beyond her years, etc,). Likewise, the empirical proof of the existence of an immortal soul is just a plot device to keep the story going. The implications and effects this discovery would have on society and on religious and philosophical beliefs would have been a very interesting area that I wish the author had tried to explore, even superficially. That simply did not happen, although admittedly, this wasn't meant to be a philosophy text - just a huge space opera. On those terms - its a decent read (albeit not a quick one).