The Dreaming Void is the start of a new trilogy that takes place in the same universe as Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, but thousands of years later. Like those books, it's a huge, epic space opera full of powerful aliens, amazing tech, and galaxy-threatening perils, and like those books, I found it packed with Big Ideas and should-have-been intriguing characters that never really thrilled me.Given my similarly lukewarm feelings about Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and Charles Stross, I am starting to think that British SF just doesn't do it for me.In The Dreaming Void, there are numerous factions at work in the human Commonwealth, centuries after the great war with the alien Primes that almost wiped it out. It's governed by a sort of collective AI/post-human network known as the Advanced Neural Activity, while humans are somewhat divided in how trans-human/post-human/enhanced/immortal they want to be.At the center of the conflict in the story is the Void, sitting at the center of the galaxy and swallowing stars at a sedate-by-human standards pace, but rapidly enough to significantly shorten the galaxy's lifespan on a cosmic scale. While the Void is kind of like a black hole in that nothing that enters it can escape, humans have apparently disappeared into the Void before and supposedly, according to dreams shared by a messianic figure named Inigo, survived there. Then Inigo disappears, and his billions of followers undertake a pilgrimage to the Void. This upsets a number of alien races, including the Raiel, who believe that messing with the Void could cause it to enter an "expansion" phase in which it begins growing and swallowing up the galaxy at a dramatically faster pace.There are a lot of characters all engaged in separate subplots, not all of whom seem to bear directly on the central threat. While you don't need to have read Pandora's Star or Judas Unchained first, there are many references to events in that book, and several returning characters. (Humans, thanks to uploads, rejuvenations, and stasis fields, can now have lifespans measured in centuries or even millenia.) In particular the return of the Javert-like Paula Myo will no doubt be greeted with applause by fans of the first two books, and the constant references to Ozzie Isaacs suggest he's almost certain to appear again, probably at the series climax. But there's also a subplot about a young ex-waitress named Amarinta and her many love affairs, in which Hamilton carries on that fine sci-fi tradition of trying to write imaginative sci-fi sex and just making me want to skip ahead to the intrigue and the aliens.Running through the book are Inigo's dream chapters, which are the saga of a young man named Edeard on a barely-post-medieval world within the Void. It is implied that these people are descendants of the human explorers who first entered the Void, but Edeard's story reads more like a traditional epic fantasy, in which psychic powers replace magic, and Edeard is of course the Chosen One. Despite realizing at an early age that he is far more powerful than all the other telepathic and telekinetic humans on his world, he watches his village get wiped out by bandits, then travels to the big city and becomes a member of the constabulary, where naturally he learns that everything is corrupt and he can't really make a difference — until he unleashes his spectacular abilities.Oddly, despite reading like fantasy rather than SF, and taking place completely parallel to the main plot, I found Edeard's chapters the most interesting ones in the book.There is plenty left hanging at the end of this whopper of a book, and it was just enjoyable enough for me to maybe want to continue the trilogy, but it just didn't grab me. A lot of it seems like rehashing the Pandora's Star duology. Sure, one would expect some of those events to be mentioned, but it's over a thousand years later — even in a super-technological society with functional immortals, I think Hamilton could have made the Commonwealth more different from its previous incarnation than it is. There is also a sameness to Paula Myo chasing cultists and nefarious agents around the galaxy trying to figure out which faction, human or alien, is really up to what. And while theoretically, a void at the galactic core threatening to expand and swallow the whole galaxy should feel like an existential threat, there is, at least not yet, none of the sense of impending doom we got when the Primes were on the verge of exterminating humanity in Judas Unchained.So, this is really a 3.5 star book, but rounded upward since I probably will read the next one.
The last time I read a book by Peter F. Hamilton was around mid-April 2014, as I write it is the 2nd of April 2015, almost a year in between. The book was The Naked God, 1268 pages of eye watering mayhem. What that useless factoid means is that his books are so damn long that after I finish a series by him I tend to feel the need to take a year’s break. What it also indicates is that after a while I always come back for more of his long winded adventures. Having said that The Dreaming Void is a mere 607 pages long, practically a pamphlet by his standard! The Dreaming Void is the first volume of Hamilton’s Void Trilogy, the trilogy itself is a sequel to Pandora’s Star, PFH does not waste any time faffing about before hooking you with his action packed opener and awesome world building. The Dreaming Void is set 1,500 years after the end of the Saga ( Judas Unchained). The Dreaming Void introduces “The Void” a universe within the universe that is gradually devouring the galaxy, like some kind of cosmic Pac-Man. Some religious types want to make a pilgrimage there to find some kind of Promised Land, while others suspect it will cause the Void to expand and accelerate the galaxy consumption. As usual initially there are quite a few neologisms for the readers to grapple with, but PFH has a knack of revealing the meaning of his weird words by implication, so the meaning of most of these words can be fairly easily inferred. The fantasy - like chapters initially threw me for a loop a little but once I get used to them they are even more fun than the sci-fi ones. I think this is due to the likable Chosen One protagonist called Edward. The world building in these chapters is also a nice change from the high tech scenario of the other chapters, at the same time this is not the average fantasy setting with magic and dragons. There is technology of a sort here, based on the conceit that everybody has mental powers to some degree, and such powers take place of electricity and most aspects of life. The most advanced and important type of science seems to be bioengineering through manipulation of organic matters into desired forms.The science fiction side of it is as great as ever, setting the story 1,500 years after The Common Wealth Saga means that Hamilton has to come up with a lot of new technology which is far in advance of the already futuristic technology depicted in the previous series. So communication and networking across the galaxy through wormholes is in use. Most of the enhanced humans of the yore are now transhuman uploaded into some kind of galactic data storage, living in their private virtual worlds. Top of the line spaceships are armed with black hole creation weapons etc. There are numerous alien races of course, and the most advanced of them still make humanity look like cavemen. The trouble with setting the story so far in the future (3589 AD) is that while many things changed out of all recognition, some things don’t seem to have changed enough, like people are still behaving as they do today, drinking beer, falling in love and whatnot. Still, PFH is only human, not transhuman so I can live with this minor flaw in his depiction of humanity in the far future; and who is to say he is not right?Hamilton knows how to write characters, they are not terribly deep or complex but they are mostly interesting and believable enough to be more than mere plot devices. The central characters are all quite likable, and it helps that a few of them are from the Commonwealth Saga (thousands of years do not mean much in term of mortality in this universe). His narrative is always a breeze to read, though there are a few sex scenes which are decidedly unsexy and made me cringe, and I thought he left that kind of thing behind after the Night’s Dawn trilogy. Hopefully he will have curbed this tendency in future volumes.Reading over this review (I do proofread my own writing occasionally!) the emphasis seems to be on the "fun factor" of the book. I do think the whole point of reading PFH is for the fun of it, I don't think you can expect much in the way of insightful commentary on the human condition or acerbic social satire. Nothing wrong with that of course we all need to just kick back and enjoy sometime, and this is far from being mindless entertainment, as the sci-fi aspect of it is very imaginative and stimulating. I am certainly looking forward to reading the next volume The Temporal Void.(Five-ish stars, like 4.6 or something)
What do You think about The Dreaming Void (2008)?
I must have been a teenager the last time I read proper science fiction (you know, the stuff with spaceships and shit). I have no idea what stopped me reading science fiction then (I remain to this day deeply in touch with my childhood Doctor Who fan) and no real clue why I got it into my head to start reading it now. All I know is that Peter Hamilton seems a big name in British science fiction these days and so I thought I’d give him a whirl.If I’m honest this isn’t the easiest book to write review of, as it’s very clearly part of a bigger trilogy. To put forward a firm and unbending opinion would be a little like switching a film off after half an hour and saying loudly what you think of the whole. However I’ve so far enjoyed this futuristic riff on religion. A black hole-esque phenomenon (the void of the title) exists at the edge of our galaxy, and inside is perceived to exist a utopia – where a character knows as the Water Walker is a messiah. When believers announce their intention to go into this void, various factions react to preserve their own interests.Hamilton’s prose isn’t the most exciting I’ve ever read, but he clearly has a fantastic imagination and a talent for creating wild and vast alien worlds and future-scapes. And even though it can be sometimes hard to keep all the characters fixed in one’s head (imagine if Tolstoy didn’t have that guide to characters at the beginning [this is the only time I’m going to compare Peter Hamilton to Tolstoy]), this is an intriguing read which has left me hungry for the second part. I will be grabbing hold of it very soon.
—F.R.
There’s a certain kind of science fiction that’s pretty much indistinguishable from straight-up mages-and-maidens goofy fantasy. Up until now, Peter F. Hamilton’s books generally seemed to advertise themselves as nice, solid hard sci-fi, especially the recent two-book “Commonwealth Saga,” in which the human race, having reached the stars via wormholes, finds itself in a desperate battle with the plausible, implacably inimical alien Prime. I devoured Pandora’s Star and found myself checking the sci-fi new-releases shelf at B&N almost weekly for a year before I could see how it all turned out in Judas Unchained. I was thrillingly rewarded for the wait. The stakes were high, the science convincing, the story strong..Alas, in this new book, the bad guy is, like, a black hole? Or something? At the center of the galaxy? A black hole that seemingly contains, like, one planet? Somehow stuck in the dark ages and populated largely by jerky people with telekinetic powers? But wait, somehow the black hole is talking to the rest of the universe through dreams, but the dreams seem more like chunks from some fantasy book written by a twelfth-grader? And meanwhile, out in our galaxy, people are busy flying around between solar systems with never a mention of relativistic effects while worrying about “evolving to postphysicality” (which to my mind shows a pretty weak understanding of the meaning of the word “evolution”). Unlike the gritty believability of the Commonwealth books, in the universe of this sequel series the “science” behaves like nothing more than magic, and technological or physical limitations are simply ignored in the service of the lame and tedious story. I mean, come on. Even if you elect to take as granted the idea that spaceships with “ultradrive” could scoot around the universe at “fifty-five light years per hour” or that a “gaiafield” could facilitate instant communication anywhere in the galaxy, still, could you really also accept that a pissed-off alien “Skylord” could cause “gravity waves” to cross fifty light years of empty space instantly? I mean, ignoring a theoretical impossibility is one thing, but rewriting the observed laws of everyday physics is another: Gravity can’t travel faster than light—not in our universe, it cannot. So when two guys with “biononic enhancements” can throw down on each other with lightning bolts and force shields, it’s really no different than Gandalf and Saruman, or Superman and Mister Mxyzptlk duking it out. A universe in which “stabilizer field generators” can completely obviate the effects of entropy is not our universe, no way, no how—the laws of thermodynamics are not going to be revoked at any time in the next few epochs. To my way of thinking, it’s not really science fiction if there’s not really any science involved.This book is, in short, not unreadable. But it is completely silly, disappointing, and best avoided.
—Chuckell
The Dreaming Void is much in the vein of Hamilton's post-Greg Mandel work - that is a door-stop sized tome of space opera. The technical approach is also the same as the Night's Dawn Trilogy and the Commonwealth Saga; a large set of characters are introduced with very little apparent connection between them at the outset but as events proceed, those connections become more apparent. THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN CURTAILED IN PROTEST AT GOODREADS' CENSORSHIP POLICYSee the complete review here:http://arbieroo.booklikes.com/post/33...
—Robert
