Night Without Stars - Peter F. Hamilton

 ***** A sumptuous conclusion (for now?) for the Commonwealth Universe

Every time I read a new space opera by Hamilton I think this author has reached the maximum of his expression and that the next book, especially considering that this universe contains seven of them, cannot possibly be better than this.

Every time I find out I was wrong.

“Night Without Stars” is a wonderfully complex novel. It is the second part of the duology titled “Chronicles of the Fallers”, yet, having read the first book (“The Abyss Beyond Dreams”) more than a year ago and remembering very little of it, I think you can almost read this last one as standalone (although I do not recommend that), as it mostly has a narrative arc of its own, within which the links to the previous volume of the series are quickly explained and what is needed in relation to the entire Commonwealth Universe is mentioned.

Before starting to read it, I wondered what Hamilton could have come up with, since the story took place again on the planet Bienvenido. I feared a revival of the themes already seen but, instead, I had really nothing to worry about.

The story, after some introductory (but no less exciting) chapters, moves forward for two and a half centuries, a period of time that determines significant changes on Bienvenido, now that it has been expelled from the Void and can finally make use of technology, including the aerospace one (so dear to me). And in this renewed setting new characters come to life, around which parallel narrative lines are created and in which it is natural to the reader to identify themselves, despite often those characters are one against the other. Each storyline is compelling even without having to look at the big picture and, in this regard, I find the idea of dividing the work into books very apt.

There are also some old characters, which I had to get acquainted with again because of the time passed after reading the previous book (and the Void Trilogy), and which allow the reader to accurately reconnect the threads of the general plot and be led towards its complex development.

And it was to this very complex story, which accompanied me for a few weeks of (deliberate) slow reading, that I returned with interest every evening, and then left it without regret for sleeping, certain that I would find it there waiting for me the next day.

The rhythm at the beginning is slow, to allow the reader to settle in (and what a wonderful setting!), then it becomes a crescendo that in the last quarter of the novel turns into a succession of twists tending towards an ending that is almost impossible to predict.

Meanwhile, Hamilton does not just make you live on Bienvenido, but also shows you other unimaginable worlds (apart by him, of course), other more or less peaceful alien species, introduces you to new aspects of the villains, the alien species called Fallers (who “eggsum” their prey and replace it), and even manages to make you like one of them (or at least he succeeded with me).

It is difficult to tell anything else about this novel without revealing too much about the plot. I can only say that, if you have come to consider the idea to read it, a sign that you certainly already know and appreciate Hamilton at least from the previous book, this time too you won’t be disappointed.

Night Without Stars on Amazon.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams - Peter F. Hamilton

***** The Void Returns

Seven years after reading the Void Trilogy, I returned to the Commonwealth universe created by Hamilton with this first book in the Chronicle of the Fallers duology and met Nigel Sheldon in a new story set in the Void. Chronologically the story outside this anomaly located in our galaxy overlaps in part with that of the trilogy but has minimal contact with the latter. In the Void, however, we know new characters in a new planet where a spaceship was conducted about two hundred years before (but three thousand passed in it): Bienvenido. In addition, we have a way of discovering something more about the purpose of the existence of the Void.

The novel, divided into several books, is long and complex, but all the threads are quickly assembled accurately by the author and with great fun of the reader. Along with the class struggles of a civilisation that for three thousand years sees its evolution blocked by the aversion of the Void against the most advanced technologies, there is the struggle against a new alien species that, using a deception that certainly isn’t a novelty in science fiction (“Invasion of Body Snatchers” immediately came to mind), is a subtle and constant threat to the inhabitants of Bienvenido. At the same time, however, it will prove to be a resource.

After reading the novel - no doubt the most beautiful one I read by this author so far - the desire to get the sequel immediately is very strong. And I guess, as far as I am concerned, I’ll go along with it soon.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams on Amazon.

The Nano Flower - Peter F. Hamilton

**** Perfectly built, but too calculated and cold towards the ending

I liked this novel very much, until I came to the last part on New London, of which I am not really able to digest the conclusion. And this inevitably has a negative influence on my overall judgment.

As always Hamilton is a master at managing complex plots in an elaborate backdrop and make many well developed characters interact in it. In this sense, “The Nano Flower” is the link between its first production set on Earth in the near future and the space opera of his later books.

Although the series is known as the Greg Mandel trilogy, Mandel has a secondary role in this book, as he is on stage as much as the other characters, or even less than them. I must say this disappointed me a bit, because I really like this character, who in the previous books was undoubtedly the hero, and I expected at least a most decisive role of him in the resolution of the story, which however didn’t happen. The cornerstone of this novel is no doubt Julia Evans, although she cannot be considered the protagonist either. More simply it can be called a choral novel.

Less investigative than the previous ones, which is not necessarily positive, and more imaginative, although longer, this book is more fast-paced and engaging than them, thanks to the always excellent prose of Hamilton.

I would have given five stars, but I found the whole story of Royan, including the ending, quite depressing. I could not, in any way, like his selfish choices towards his family. His motives still don’t make sense to me. And likewise I found Julia too cold in reacting to the dramatic conclusion of the story of this character. I felt, in the behaviour of both, something deeply wrong in terms of human emotions, which gave me the feeling that the ending was almost worked out in the cold, without any involvement, losing all contact with the humanity of the characters. And all this clashes with the way Hamilton had dug up to that point in their mind and psychology.

I also have difficulty to consider credible that a character as powerful as Julia Evans really cares so much for the good of mankind and secondarily for her interests. It is unrealistic to say the least, especially when compared with the far from rosy future that is described in this trilogy.

Both aspects have caused my suspension of disbelief to collapse. What a pity.

The Nano Flower on Amazon.

A Quantum Murder - Peter F. Hamilton

**** Who killed Edward Kitchener?

The second book in the Greg Mandel Trilogy is in some ways a proper mystery. All the elements are there: one dead, a secluded place, a small number of possible culprits, many of which would have a good reason to kill him, and apparently no one of them did it. To figure out who the murderer is, you must choose the least likely, but can in no way imagine what lies beneath. The sci-fi element is what makes the magic, leaving you speechless.

As always in Hamilton’s books the characters are believable and tridimensional, and even likeable. His elegant prose involves you, transporting you inside their mind and showing the reality through their eyes.

The novel, however, does not stand comparison with the first. Once the surprise after discovering and understanding Mandel’s abilities, given to him by his gland, is over, the author had to create a new story unrelated to the previous one, so that the novel could be a standalone. This is made possible by the numerous recaps on past events and the historical and political situation, which on the one hand slow down the book and the other bore the reader who had already endured all those explanations in “Mindstar Rising”. I understand the need to put them, but not to make them so long.

Even if the intricate case treated in this novel is completely new, I found too many similar elements to the previous book that caused me a sense of déjà-vu. There are too many descriptions. In the first book they were essential, because the reader was experiencing a new world. In the second they become annoying. In general, with the exception of the last part, which has an excellent pace, the book shows a very slow action (relatively few things happen for a book of 376 pages written in small print) and at the same time is not always able to keep the reader interested with new and original elements.

However, the last chapter is very nice and improved my judgment on the book.

A Quantum Murder on Amazon.

Mindstar Rising - Peter F. Hamilton

***** A novel that reads your mind

In titling this review I have deliberately played with the plot of the book. “Mindstar Rising” in fact has as its protagonist a former military, Greg Mandel, who was implanted with a special gland that allows him to feel the emotions of other people, and in a sense, to read their minds, even if not literally. Mandel is now a private detective who finds himself investigating a plot of global reach focused on the young heir to a billionaire. The story is set in a dystopian near future, a future in which global warming has transformed England into an almost deserted place where seas invaded the coasts and changed their morphology, where oil is over, and people live in a world degraded in a mixture of low and high tech, the second especially is the prerogative of the rich.

The setting is picturesque, though I cannot stand post-apocalyptic stories, but the plot revolves around something very different and so this aspect hasn’t had a negative influence on my judgment.

Although we are faced with situations very different from those of the usual books by Hamilton, his style is recognizable in the extreme complexity of the plot, the description of uninhibited erotic situations narrated as something natural, his long scenes that keep you glued to the pages of the book, his sought language that forces you to concentrate to the maximum while reading, the ending that can tear a smile.

This is the first novel of Hamilton, the first of a trilogy that I will continue to read soon. In a sense, I appreciated  it even more than his space operas, perhaps because imagining a near future gave me more references in the present and made it easier to imagine myself in the story. Hamilton’s characters are alive and you just want to know more about them. Also it is a thriller set in the future with shades of transhumanism, in other words a cyberpunk technothriller, but very contemporary, although it was published twenty years ago and some technological aspect is slightly outdated. But it differs from a certain obscurity of other books of this subgenre dated back to ten or more years earlier, making it an accessible read to a wider audience that goes beyond science fiction.

Unfortunately, the book has never been translated into my language (Italian) and reading it in English requires a good knowledge of the language, given the richness of the language used by the author and his high register. But it can also be an opportunity to improve your English.

Finally, the edition I read, the one published on the twentieth anniversary of the novel (each copy is numbered and signed by the author) also contains a previously unpublished novella in the first part of the book, but chronologically inserted at the end of the trilogy. It is a proper detective story, but set in the future and with an unpredictable and politically incorrect ending, which I would call it à la Hamilton and which makes it very different from other stories of this genre.

Mindstar Rising on Amazon.

Science fiction and spirituality: post-physical life, part #2

In the previous post of this series (which you can find here) I introduced the topic of post-physical life in science fiction, identifying the three approaches by which it is represented (soft, intermediate, and hard) and offering some examples of the first two.

Today, however, I want to present some examples of the so-called hard approach, which is typical of cyberpunk and of all that science fiction in which the role of the net (anyhow this is represented) and virtual reality is predominant.

Cyberpunk actually was born in the 80s, that is, before the Internet (which comes for the first time to the public in 1991), but it is the access to the net and the concept of virtual reality that have added to this sub-genre of science fiction the ability to represent post-physical life. This is thanks to the presence in the stories of some technology that can digitize the consciousness of a human being, giving the illusion of making it eternal, thus defeating death.

Beyond the fact that you are defeating death or not, if you accept the concept that a software application created as a copy of an organic consciousness is in fact alive (and this is taken for granted in this type of stories), this is definitely post-physical life.

Given the topical theme, there are numerous examples of this type of approach. The following relate to some of my readings and a film I've seen recently, but you could write a treatise on the subject.

In fact I have already talked about post-physical life in some of my previous posts (and podcasts) dedicated to the relationship between science fiction and spirituality.

Within the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton (here the series of posts dedicated to it) we saw the so-called ANA-Government, where ANA stands for Advanced Neural Activity. The ANA is nothing but a collection of digitized consciences of all human beings who, tired of the physical life (the story is set in 36th century where the physical life may be extended almost indefinitely), decide to migrate to Earth and then download their digitized consciousness into ANA, in which they can communicate with each other in a virtual reality, while, thanks to the net and/or the ability to download themselves temporarily onto clones or solid projections, they can continue to interact with the physical world.

In the franchise of Battlestar Galactica (here is the post dedicated to it), instead, particularly in the spin-off Caprica, we saw a different kind of post-physical life. Zoe Greystone creates a virtual copy of her, thanks to her invention of a program that generates it by a process of extrapolation from all the activities in the net by the original person. This copy of Zoe not only has all the memories of the original, but does not feel at all as a copy, and when Zoe dies, it is considered like a post-physical version of her.

But let's briefly see two more examples.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks is a cyberpunk novel, where in the distant future, after using the 8 physical lives granted, a digitized consciousness pass to a post-physical life in the Cript (a very complex virtual reality), where 8 more digital lives are granted to it. The difference is that the digital consciousness does not age, but it can be killed by accident or murdered.

Transcendence is the recent film with Johnny Depp where, in an attempt to create a strong artificial intelligence, they come to the conclusion that the only way to be sure that an AI has a consciousness is to copy an existing one. Will Caster is going to die and uploads his consciousness (through a long process explained in a pseudo-scientific way) creating an immortal copy of himself, which is carrying all the baggage of experiences and feelings of the original person as much as it feels as such.

A peculiar aspect of (almost) all these stories about virtual consciousness is that they tend to consider a digital copy equivalent to the original, as if the true consciousness/soul is passed to virtual reality, in a process comparable to that of the soft approach (ascension of the soul). In truth it is not so.

The original dies and what remains is only a copy.

Rarely this issue is addressed, because those who interact with this copy has the impression, or rather the illusion, to have to do with the original. In fact, however, the digitization of consciousness does not defeat death, it's just an illusion to defeat it, because the original no longer exists. The original dies anyway. Who thinks of becoming immortal by digitizing their conscience is only creating another form of life (non-organic life) with their memories and their character, a sort of virtual twin (which is the same, theoretically, as all twins, but yet another person).

Only the copy will have the illusion of having defeated death. The copy, having memories of the original, has the perception of being passed from a physical to post-physical condition. But nothing of the sort has happened.

If you think about it, from the original idea to fight against your fears of death you come to the fact that, when you die, no one will cry for you, because for the others you don't die.

Personally I find this quite disturbing. More than a victory over death this is simple the denial of death. It would be interesting to see this issue addressed in science fiction. (Maybe someone can suggest a good book or film about this?)

Even in Caprica, where the fact that Zoe is a digital copy is clear, having been created by the original, and having lived with her for some time, when the real Zoe dies, the other characters, despite being aware of the true nature of the virtual one, decide to ignore this fact.

In the end, the digitization of consciousness is a method to avoid suffering for the death of others rather than to avoid fearing for your own death.

With these almost philosophical considerations I'm closing this post.

In the next one, that will be the last dedicated to post-physical life, I'll report two other examples of books, definitely less known than the Void Trilogy, in which, however, the return from post-physical to physical life reappears. From this last point, I will make some concluding remarks on the similarities and differences between post-physical life and another topic that somehow appears in science fiction, that is reincarnation.

If At First... - Peter F. Hamilton (short review)

***** A treat

It must be said that this is really a very short story. The entire ebook was created as a promotional tool, and the story occupies only one third of it. I had downloaded it when it was free. I find that make people pay for it, despite the value of the author, is not honest. Yet at this moment it isn't fee, which leaves me puzzled.

Apart from that, this is a really brilliant little story about the possibility of knowing the future and how this can change the course of events. Personally, I was amazed at the skill of Hamilton in including so many details in such a small text, knowing the tendency that he has to write huge stories. He managed to build a well thought out, quite complex story, which intrigued me all the time I was reading it. I had no idea how it was going to end. And the final twist was really unexpected.

Very nice.

If at First . . . on Amazon.com.

Science fiction and spirituality: the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton [Part 3]

And here we come to the final post of the series of articles dedicated to the Void Trilogy by British author Peter F. Hamilton and anticipated by my appearance on FantaScientificast.it (an Italian podcast) in November.

In the first post I have briefly outlined the books of the trilogy, and I told you about the backstory. In the second one, however, I focused on the religious and spiritual aspects inside the story, analysing some of them and highlighting as the author loves starting from these issues and then reduces everything to material terms.

In this last post I finally express my comment on this author.

Peter F. Hamilton is without a doubt one of my favourite authors. He has become so when I read the Void Trilogy. He is so, first of all, because he writes complex stories with different reading levels. Spirituality is only one of them, which can be safely ignored by the reader who isn’t interested in this kind of topics, because the skill of this author, in my opinion, is given by his ability to measure the various elements in his books, so that none of them is too intrusive. And so Hamilton’s novels are able to satisfy the science fiction fan who prefers, for example, action, or the socio-political aspect, also typical of space opera, or even that relating to the use of virtual reality, the deepening of the characters, who are always very well characterised also by the emotional point of view, and so on.

To tell you the truth, some consider him a bit verbose, on the other hand we are talking about an author who hardly writes novels under 600 pages. The length of his stories doesn’t only concerns the complexity of the plot, which in itself would be enough, but also the expanded way in which he narrates certain scenes, often focusing on long dialogues or details of the action, giving the impression of a certain slowing of time during their development.

A trivial example would be a scene where a character opens a door and shoots; Hamilton is able to show the train of thoughts passing through the mind of the person concerned in that split second, but also the mental, physical and technological process of the performed act. This characteristic has the advantage of allowing him to really show us the scene, making us almost feel part of the book, especially when what he is telling us goes far beyond common imagination.

Many passages of the Void Trilogy take place in the minds of human enhanced beings that within an instant see icons, activate virtual processes, recall applications, communicate via the Unisphere and so on. These are acts that cannot be transferred to images, for example, a film adaptation would be impossible, but through his words, the author slows down action managing to make us understand all these details, which in a short time our imagination can handle with ease, without affecting negatively the suspension of disbelief.

I found myself several times reading these long scenes and having fun doing it and at the same time suffering for my curiosity to know what would happen next, a “next” which was late to come. And it ended up with me reading dozens of pages without even realizing it. And so his books with chapters with an average of 100 pages and this trilogy that exceeds 2500 pages are read in a shorter time than you might think.

Beside that, what I like about him is the ability to imagine new scenarios, mix known elements of science

fiction with very original ideas, and to really put much stuff in his books, able to open up your mind and inspire even those who write science fiction, like me. And Hamilton was very inspiring to me in the novels I’ve written until now, including the unpublished ones, even non-science fiction ones. In addition to some ideas which I admit I borrowed (after all writing is always a bit characterised by copying, sometimes unintentionally, and reworking the ideas of others), reading his books taught me not to be hasty in bringing the scenes to completion, to stop to analyse the details, emotional, sensory ones, or relating to the reasoning, in order to better show the action to the reader, in the hope to involve them as much as possible. By doing so, I found myself feeling more involved in the scenes I wrote and, I think, having a vague idea of how Hamilton himself may have fun to design and create such complex narratives.

Then I must say that this author doesn’t hold back before controversial issues in his stories, certainly suitable only for adult audiences. In Hamilton’s novels you usually find sex, narrated in the most varied situation, and decidedly alternative concepts of family (polygamy, sexual and romantic relationships with virtual entities, with more people of various kinds, with characters whose consciousness is shared by several bodies, whether they are real or virtual, etc ...), but everything is treated in a natural way, without any sense of forbidden, and this is just another of the reading levels that I referred to earlier that the reader can decide to neglect.

For me Hamilton was, in a sense, a revelation and has contributed a lot in increasing my love for science fiction, both as a reader and as a writer. One thing I always say is that if you read Hamilton and you survive, i.e. you can appreciate his novels in spite of their complexity and the excessive length of his works, then you can read pretty much everything. And I’m still convinced of that.

If you have never tried to read a book of his, I can only advise you to do so, perhaps even with the Void Trilogy. Then it will be all downhill!

Science fiction and spirituality: the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton [Part 2]

Last week I began this series of posts dedicated to the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton, offering an overview of the books, and summarizing the backstory from which arises the plot of the series. You can read all this in the previous post.

But today I want to focus on the spiritual and religious elements contained in this British author’s work. First I will make a list of topics (a discussion on common religious themes in science fiction can be found in this post) and then I will show some examples, trying to avoid as much as possible any spoiler on the plot.

Spiritual and religious topics of the Void Trilogy

1) Presence of a religion within the story. In this case I’m referring to the Living Dream. Religion is a very common element in space opera, along with politics. In this series these two aspects, as often happens in reality, get confused, so we have the case in which the religious element anchors the reader to the real life and at the same time supports the suspension of disbelief.

2) Elements mentioned in the story that are reminiscent of well-known religious topics or archetypes. There are numerous references above all to Christianity in general and to the great monotheistic religions, which are used in different contexts, but remain quite recognizable.

3) Metaphor of the spirit and the immortality of the soul. Thanks to technology a form of immortality is recreated through the perpetuation of a digitized form of consciousness.

4) Seeing the wondrous and magical elements as a simple expression of a science that we don’t know yet. This is also a recurring theme throughout the bibliography of Hamilton.

Examples of spiritual and religious topics in the Void Trilogy

After listing the topics briefly, below I present some examples taken from the series.

Let’s start obviously with the Living Dream. This has got a typical religious structure that can recall that of the various Christian churches. Since Hamilton is British, I suppose he referred to Anglicanism, even if the model is ascribable to most clerical structures.

In addition to the religious structure in itself you can see the fanaticism of believers (another very topical theme), who are very determined to find the dreamer, because they feel they need him to enter the Void and wouldn’t stop in front of anything to achieve their goal.

Religion is used here as the main engine of the events, because the whole story arises from this intention of the believers of the Living Dream, and at the same time it connects the reader to everyday reality, in which such phenomena are sadly common.

But here we observe Hamilton’s cunning in using the typical elements of existing religions, but in fact in describing a kind of fanaticism that looks more like that one addressed to celebrities. Although Edeard is seen as a sort of messiah (and the dreamer as a prophet), actually this fanaticism is not spiritual, but very materialistic. Believers want to go to Querencia, the planet in the Void, to live with their bodies that wonderful life seen through the dreams of Inigo. There is just nothing mystical in this desire.

Then there are a whole series of references to religious themes within the story, they are cleverly used as well, because ultimately there is nothing spiritual in them.

To avoid spoilers, I won’t tell you who the Waterwalker is, but it is obvious that something reminds us of the Gospel, isn’t it?

Another example is the religion existing on Querencia (a kind of religion in the religion) in which they venerate a certain Lady and there are women (priestesses/nuns) who dedicate their lives to this kind of pseudo-divinity. The Lady is depicted in a statue in a church-like building and apparently this can recall the Virgin, although reading the story this turns out to be a female figure more like Mary Magdalene.

It is clear that these similarities are not accidental, but they are - perhaps a bit irreverent - citations by Hamilton, made to bring before the reader something known and easy to understand, in a text that is instead full of elements going well beyond our ability to grasp their meaning and requiring a huge effort of imagination.

In the series it is also referred to angels flying on wings, another typically religious element, but in reality these wings are force fields and angels are spaceships.

At one point the author describes a population called Silfens, which is presented in a pastoral and mystical way (it is a kind of fantasy drift in the work, like the events narrated on Querencia). This aspect, however, is only a facade that hides a complex technology. The Silfens, for example, use the quantum entanglement to communicate (the same used for the Gaia Field).

Then we can see the spirit that is assimilated to files stored in a server, a digitized consciousness, which can be loaded into the mind of an enhanced clone of a deceased person, so it represents the illusion of defeating death (I talked about something like that also in the article on Battlestar Galactica). This can be seen as a kind of metaphor for the immortality of the soul.

And yet, the desire of believers of the Living Dream to go into the Void undoubtedly recalls the Exodus of the Jews and their desire to reach the Promised Land.

Similarly the spaceship with which the first inhabitants of Querencia arrived can be assimilated to Noah’s Ark and they are like the only survivors giving rise to a new civilization, which therefore arises from a previous one. It is also a subject that is very dear to science fiction.

Lastly, the Void itself can be likened to a kind of paradise.

Spirituality reduced to science

These are just a few examples that I still can recall more than three years after reading the series. Probably many more would come out with a more careful analysis. The point, however, is another.

On the one hand we have Hamilton that spreads many religious, spiritual and paranormal elements in this beautiful trilogy, but he does so only in appearance, and then at the end he gives everything a pseudo-scientific explanation. It is not hard science fiction, because there are ftl engines and many other scientifically impossible things, though they are less than you can imagine, but the author lingers in reducing everything to material terms, which are put in contrast to the spirituality that seemed to characterize them.

In other words we have a trilogy stuffed with spirituality with the purpose of denying it.

In the next post I will try instead to offer a my personal comments on this series by  Hamilton and in general on this author that, in addition to being one of my favourites, is without doubt one of the most interesting storytellers in the panorama of contemporary science fiction.

Science fiction and spirituality: the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton [Part 1]

My most recent appearance on FantaScientificast (Italian podcast dedicated to science fiction) with “Life On Mars?” dates back to November. And as usual I am to repeat the topic in an in-depth post on my blog.

As you can infer from the title, or by listening to the podcast, the topic is the Void trilogy by British author Peter F. Hamilton. Since it is a topic that is very dear to me, because Hamilton is one of my favourite authors, and there is definitely a lot to say, I decided to dedicate a series of three posts to it.

General information about the books in the series

The Void Trilogy is a series by British science fiction author Peter F. Hamilton and

it is included in the same universe of the Commonwealth saga, which includes two other books: “Pandora’s Star” and “Judas Unchained”. The first book of the trilogy is set chronologically 1200 years after the last one of these two books. The plot often refers to this saga, but not reading it does not compromise the understanding of the trilogy.

The series obviously includes three books, whose titles are:

“The Dreaming Void” (2007)

“The Temporal Void” (2008)

“The Evolutionary Void” (2010)

My reading of the books date back to 2010, when the first one was released in Italian and the last one into English. A little because the translation had not particularly pleased me (mainly because of the astronomical number of typos) and a little because I didn’t want to wait, after reading “The Dreaming Void”, I finished reading the trilogy in the original language.

In addition, the plot, which is very complex and rich of characters, is seamless, then waiting between a book and the other involves the risk of forgetting everything or nearly so. There are even important characters that appear for the first time towards the end of the first book, which ends with a discrete cliffhanger.

The whole Commonwealth saga (including the trilogy) is available as ebook on Amazon, like many other books by this author. Moreover, all Hamilton’s books are available on Amazon in paperback.

Backstory

The story is set in the thirty-sixth century.

The Void is a kind of self-contained universe that is at the centre of the galaxy and is studies for millions of years by aliens called Raiels. They believe it is a threat to life in the galaxy because of its sporadic phases of expansion, which devour whole solar systems close to the core of the galaxy. One of these events occurred several hundred thousand years ago, which prompted the Raiels to create a class of interstellar spaceships called High Angel with the aim to rescue sentient civilizations in the event of a new expansion. The caste of Raiel warriors serves to protect the Void from any intrusion by other living beings in the galaxy, because they fear that this could trigger a further expansion.

The Void, however, isn’t a natural system. Inside it there is a strange universe with physical laws different from those we know.

In 3589 a human being, called Inigo, began to dream of a wonderful life inside the Void. His dreams were transmitted to the rest of humanity through the Gaia Field, a kind of emotion social network, made possible in enhanced humans  containing a chip in their brain. This also allows you to store your thoughts and offers a series of advantages, including real-time connection to the network (Unisphere), communication, downloading of applications, concepts and so on.

Many humans are enhanced and live for hundreds of years. Their thoughts, their essence, consciousness, can be stored in servers, in case they die and a clone is created in which upload it. In practice, one never dies, so much so that after a long life humans decide to abandon the physical life to download their consciousness into the so-called ANA (Advanced Neural Activity), a kind of huge collector of these virtual beings, where they continue to live as thought, and which has become the government of the Commonwealth, in other words, of humanity.

Inigo’s dreams gather around him a large group of believers, who over time constitute a religion, the Living Dream and revere the protagonist of these dreams (Edeard). These believers live in a planet where they recreated the pattern of life, and even the city (Makkathran 2), which they saw in Inigo’s dreams. They are, in fact, set on a planet inside the Void called Querencia.

These believers are fanatics who want to organize a pilgrimage into the Void  to live the life that was shown to them. But the Raiels and other species (including other humans) fear that their migration, which they are certain will lead to their death, might lead to a further expansion of the Void. So they ready to stop this pilgrimage at any cost.

This is just the background from which the story takes place within the trilogy. In reading the plot some religious and spiritual elements are immediately noticeable, which occur frequently in space opera, but I intend to analyse them one by one in the next post in this series, and also to show how the author plays with these easily recognizable themes, and then bring they all to his very rational view of reality.

Fallen Dragon - Peter F. Hamilton

***** The quintessence of space opera

After the Void Trilogy, "Fallen Dragon" is the second book I read by Peter F. Hamilton and it strengthens my good opinion on this great British science fiction author. Once again I find myself speechless in front of the imagination of Hamilton, able to create extremely complex and detailed timelines, yet very different from each other.

Narrated for the most part on two parallel timelines, "Fallen Dragon" tells the story of Lawrence Newton, a mercenary who works for a big company from Earth, though he was born in another world colonized by humans. Lawrence is a soldier who participates in the campaigns of piracy against other colonized worlds, and who returns to a planet where he had already been years before, whose inhabitants have now decided to oppose to this new invasion.

For much of the book Hamilton manages to keep up the curiosity about a controversial character, a pirate, placed against a population that does not disdain acts of terrorism in order to obtain its goal. It is difficult to distinguish the good and the evil in the story and this complexity of interpretation, which seems to characterize this author, makes the story totally unpredictable. Through the use of long, but never boring, scenes full of interesting technical details, typical of hard sci-fi, once again the scientific element joins the more specifically fantastic and almost magical one. The fallen dragon of the title, which makes its appearance only towards the end of the book, evokes a mythological figure, but it's actually something much more concrete, proving once again that ignorance about technology can be mistaken for magic.

The worlds described in this book, including Earth in the twenty-fourth century, are very far from our view of reality, and yet they are terribly real and engaging. Hamilton's prose evokes vivid images, rich in colour, and makes the reader feel the same feelings of the protagonist, until the epilogue, which is able to cause a smile and maybe even a tear.

Fallen Dragon on Amazon.com.

Going back and forth in time

Flashbacks force the story to appear as
we want without changing the facts.

This is not a post about time travels, don’t worry. The moving back and forth in time I’m referring to is related to the way a story is narrated, i.e. to the use of flashbacks (or flash-forwards).

There are many way you can develop the timeline of your story. While in your mind the facts are probably in the correct chronological order, this may not be the best way to show them to the reader. Actually what makes a story interesting is not just the plot itself, but most of all the way it is narrated. It can happen that stories with a very simple plot become extremely intriguing, if the facts are not showed in a plain order. On the other hands you can have a long, complex plot, which may turn out boring, if the events are simply narrated as they happen one after one.

Flashbacks are a very powerful tool for writers who want to take control on the way their readers get to learn about the story facts. They become just like pieces of a puzzle. At the beginning you have some information, which seems unrelated to each other, just like different sections of a puzzle. Then, at some point, you find a kind of bridge between two sections and toward the end all pieces perfectly match giving you the whole picture of the story. I find this to be a very entertaining way to get to experience a story, both for the reader and for the writer.

There isn’t only a way to weave the different timelines in a plot, but the most common one occurs when you have two of them (present and past time) and there are alternated chapter by chapter or scene by scene. At the beginning they seem really different, until the reader spot the first connection.

As I said in my previous post, I’m currently reading “Fallen Dragon” by Peter F. Hamilton (I’m almost done with it). This is an excellent example of this use of flashbacks. Hamilton alternates chapter set in the present time with others which are referred to the past.

In the first one (present), Lawrence, the protagonist, is busy in a very difficult asset realization campaign (a kind of piracy) in a planet called Thallspring. The second one (past), instead, shows the reader how he got there, starting when he was just a kid. Both timelines have the same space and value in the stories, there isn’t one which is less important or includes less action. Both of them give us important information until, in the end (I suppose), they merge to the conclusion of the story.

I’ve seen something like that also in the Void Trilogy of Hamilton, and I tend to think he likes very much using flashbacks this way. While thinking back at the story itself, I must admit that if it were been told in a more linear way (we are talking about an 800-page story), it wouldn’t be so much appealing. That’s because most events from the past are actually quite isolated self-concluding episodes, which would get the reader to a halt at the end of them. On the contrary, putting them as a pause in the exciting action of the present time give them more value, because from time to time they offer new clues, which helps the understanding of the main plot. At the same time they increase the expectation about what would happen next.

But there are other ways to use flashbacks. Actually I found myself thinking about Hamilton’s books, when I realize that the reason I like them so much is that a love to use a very similar trick in my own novels.

They are not as long and complicated, scenes are much faster than in his books, but all the same I like to start the story in media res and keep at least two timelines. But I go further, because I’m less equilibrated in showing past and present; I actually tend to be a bit more chaotic (but not too much) for making things even more fun.

Though there is a main timeline, I like to get back to different points of the past based on the event itself, which is narrated, instead of its position in time, using a way of showing a story that reminds me the way memory works, i.e. by associations. I find this kind of approach a bit less constructed and a bit more natural. What I yearn for is to take the reader by their hand and fly with them in the story as smoothly as possible, letting the few interruptions be put in very strategic points of the plot, those which cinema calls plot points, thus allowing them to be emphasised.

Anyway, whatever the way they are used, jumps in time are a great way to forcing a story to appear as we want without changing the events of which it is made of.

And what’s your opinion about the use of flashbacks? How often do you use them in your writing? How do you like them in the books you read?

Writing what you know in science fiction and the suspension of disbelief

Peter F. Hamilton uses what he knows
to show us his vision of the future.

"Write what you know." 

How often we writers have heard this sentence and how many times we shook our head?

There are authors who are so tied to this concept that they only tell stories which end up becoming self-referential and, let's face it, not all that interesting, unless you have an extraordinary life.

If its meaning had to be taken to the letter, the whole speculation fiction would not exist at all. This is because you cannot know something that does not exist.

Admitting there is a problem in this famous statement, at the same time, does not mean that you should ignore it completely. As with all literary advices, it should be interpreted.

When you are suggested to write about what you know, you are not intended to focus only on this, but to include also this in your books. The difference between the two interpretations is enormous.

Although you write stories set in imaginary places and with impossible technologies, what makes them real are the little details and on these you should focus while narrating about what you experienced.

They may be small gestures of the characters, or interpersonal relationships, all aspects that are universal and transcend the spatial or temporal setting of a story. Moreover you can refer to real places, although transferred in contexts that are not real at all. Or you can include elements of our everyday life reinvented in the sci-fi story.

There are a lot of examples. In these days I'm reading the wonderful "Fallen Dragon" by Peter F. Hamilton, probably the greatest contemporary British science fiction author so far. Hamilton writes very long novels, which is already very peculiar. Moreover he narrates about very distant futures, in this case the twenty-fifth century. It is obvious that his imagination plays a vital role in filling the more than eight hundred pages of the book. It is equally obvious that he cannot have direct knowledge of how Earth will be in four hundred years, let alone any human colonies on other planets. But, if you read his book, you'll find that what makes it really captivating is not the ultra-advanced technology itself, but the human story of the protagonists.

In this novel we see the rule of "write what you know" applied in many different ways. There is the story of a clumsy teenager, similar to that of any other boy of his age. There is Earth in the future, but it is fully recognizable. Hamilton lingers even on showing how the buildings along the canals in Amsterdam are exactly as in the past, with the pulleys to lift the furniture and bring them into the houses.

This example shows the power of applying this principle. I have been to Amsterdam and while reading that passage of the novel I found myself there again in a second.

The inclusion of actual, known elements in a science fiction story has the ability to anchor the reader to something very clear in their mind, which is part of their personal experience, and thanks to which they are then brought to suspend their disbelief on anything else in the text.

Some time ago on FantaScientificast (an Italian sci-fi podcast) I spoke about how this mechanism works well with religion. We all have to do with religion, willy-nilly. Even if we are not believers, the religious elements, especially from Christianity (depending in which country you live), are part of our cultural background. And then, if an author includes a religion, themes or real elements relating to religion (like biblical quotations, hierarchical structures that remind us of the Church, architectural elements and so on), the reader recognizes them and takes a position of agreement or disagreement against them, ending up to identify themselves in the situation and the characters.

The idea of telling what you know is even more important in science fiction, when the latter addresses scientific topics, which usually are based on something real.

Again, in the above-mentioned book by Hamilton are amazing technologies that enable mankind to travel through portals to places at unimaginable distances or to change entire planets in order to make them suitable for human survival. It is obvious that in this case completely invented elements are often shown, but most details instead rely on scientific theories, even proven ones, from which the author takes its cue to develop the speculative part.

But this is precisely how we achieve the magic. Sometimes the two types of information are so closely related that even a reader with a scientific background finds it hard to establish clear boundaries between what is real and what is invented. The competence of the author on what is real is confused with the use of fantasy on what is invented. And once again you see the perfect fulfilment of the suspension of disbelief.

This article is originally available in Italian on Kipple Blog.