BOOK REVIEW: Peter F. Hamilton's THE DREAMING VOID

Peter F. Hamilton's The Dreaming Void is the first book in the British hard sci-fi writer's new trilogy, which has been dubbed the Void Trilogy.

Hamilton has been one of my favorite authors (not just my favorite genre author) for several years. I started with his classic work, the incredible Night's Dawn Trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God) and continued with his Commonwealth Saga. (MadProfessah's reviews of Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained are also available.)

Like most of Hamilton's work, The Dreaming Void is a sprawling novel, with a huge cast of characters and numerous intersecting and separate plots. An interesting feature of this book, which repeats something he did in Fallen Dragon, is the inclusion of an entire storyline in which technology is not featured--it is a pretty straightforward individual hero fantasy; it even includes a star-crossed, teen romance. Peter Hamilton is known as a hard-core purveyor of the hardest military sci-fi space operas, so for him to devote a good third of his book to a fantasy is an intriguing blending of disparate genres.

It's an interesting choice, because most fans of one genre are not necessarily fans of the other genre (the only fantasy book I have read recently, for example is Patrick Rothfuss' excellent The Name of the Wind). It also works well, because the fantasy sequence, which is the story of Edeard, an orphaned country boy who becomes the fabled Waterwalker in the big city of Makkathran on the planet of Querencia, is excellent and gripping.

The hard sci-fi sequence, which tells the stories of how the Commonwealth has changed in the fifteen hundreds years since Judas Unchained and Pandora's Star is oddly not as compelling as the fantasy sections. It's not clear if this is because we have been exposed to most of these characters before (Paula Myo, Senator Justine Burnelli, Wilson Kime, Oscar Monroe et cetera) or if the changes that have occurred over time to the Commonwealth Universe are not as interesting as we would have expected.

I do think the conceit of how the two sequences are connected is interesting (what happens on Makkathran appears as what is known as Inigo's Dreams and is accessed by Commonwealth citizens through something called the Gaiafield, a Galaxy-wide network invented by Ozzie Isaacs (who previously co-invented wormhole travel technology) that allows humans to share emotions and thoughts. An entire religion has developed around Inigo's Dreams which it is believed must be emanating from The Void, a strange anomaly at the center of the Galaxy which frightens the Raiel, the incredibly powerful aliens from the earlier books.

How Hamilton manages to tie together all of these multiple threads is a gripping, somewhat exhausting tale which demonstrates that he is once again a master of the craft of compelling speculative fiction for an expanding audience.

Hardcover: 640 pages.
Publisher: Del Rey.
Date: March 25, 2008.

OVERALL GRADE: A/A-.

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A-.