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This is a book review. I'm posting it here and also cross-posting to my ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
marrax journal.
The Void Trilogy, of which this is the first book, are set approximately 1500 years after the end of Hamilton's prior Commonwealth Saga.
The Void is what us primitive humans supposed was a giant black hole at the centre of the galaxy. Oh little we know: it's actually a vast, dangerous, immensely old alien construction that is slowly eating everything in its path. The Raiel have been trying to hold it back for a million years, and are only partially succeeding. Dozens of species, including humans from the Commonwealth, sit and watch it from a monitoring station on a planet several light years away.
Inigo arrives at this observation post trying to escape his heritage, and ends up with something he never bargained for: dreams of life inside the Void. His dreams, broadcast by a kind of neural empathy net, become akin to a religion and a couple of hundred years after his first dream, he has billions of followers, most of them wanting to journey into the Void themselves. Inigo disappears again, leaving his followers - now in control of entire planets and economies - in the hands of the Cleric Conservators. That latest one to be elected, Ethan, announces his intent to launch a Pilgramage fleet to the Void. This is something the Raiel, as well as various factions within the Commonwealth, aren't too keen on: they think it will cause a disastrous devourment phase.
Aaron witnesses Ethan announce the Pilgramage. He doesn't know much about himself. He certainly doesn't remember anything from before he arrived to watch. He just knows he has to stop the Pilgrimage, and to do that, he has to find Inigo. He's well-backed - plenty of currency, and plenty of very lethal hardware, the latter conveniently packed into his own body's enhanced cellular structure.
There are two main threads to The Dreaming Void. The first follows Aaron in a bloody trail across the Commonwealth as he attempts to track down the elusive Dreamer. The second thread, and the one that takes up about forty percent of the book, are transcripts of Inigo's first seven dreams, which follow the life of a young boy named Edeard, an inhabitant of a planet seemingly within the Void, as he makes the journey from lowly, but talented, apprentice in a small village, to the position of Constable in the planet's great city, Makkathran. Numerous other threads follow characters old (as in, familiar to those who've read the Commonwealth Saga) and new (admittedly one of them is unashamedly used to help those who didn't read the previous books to catch up on events) as they do the bidding of various factions of ANA - Advanced Neural Activity - a computer containing the minds of most of Earth's citizens that has become its official government. Then there's the Second Dreamer, someone that everyone wants to get their hands on.
Well, The Dreaming Void is typical Hamilton, that's for sure. Lots of sex, lots of big pretty toys, quite a bit of violence (Hamilton admits to reading Richard Morgan on his website, and Aaron reminds me a lot of Takeshi Kovacs!), a cast of thousands, story threads that just don't seem to have any relation to each other (yet). The dream sequences are a departure, and are a welcome and refreshing relief from the hectic pace of the Commonwealth. Edeard's world is a medieval one, slow-paced, where it takes a year to travel across the country in a caravan, and where guns (aside from certain frowned-upon telekenetic abilities) are the ultimate weapons.
A lot of what happened in the Commonwealth Saga is explained during the book, but it does help to have read them because whilst events are one thing, the motiviations behind some of the returning characters are only really mentioned in passing. (1500 years really isn't anything to the average Commonwealth citizen, after all they'd pretty much had mortality licked even back then - they've just refined things to a much greater extent!)
Flashbacks aside, there's very little wasted space. The plots are a lot more focused than the Commonwealth Saga, certainly more so than the Night's Dawn trilogy. It's a shame that Hamilton can't really come up with much more than a homogenised everyone's-happy picture of humanity (the Commonwealth is presented as being somewhat bland...) but at least he knows what he can and can't do, so stays away from politics and concentrates on action. In that way, the Commonwealth provides the devices by which his characters enjoy themselves - and there are some pretty nifty devices. Personally I don't see what the fuss is all about, I'll take a full set of Higher bionincs right now, thanks! What better way to lose weight than just telling my body that's what I want to do.
Everything's very neatly set up for the next book in the trilogy (provisionally title The Temporal Void. Events inside and outside the Void come to a head, and we're all left on tenterhooks waiting to see just what happens next. Personally, I can't wait.
marrax journal.The Void Trilogy, of which this is the first book, are set approximately 1500 years after the end of Hamilton's prior Commonwealth Saga.
The Void is what us primitive humans supposed was a giant black hole at the centre of the galaxy. Oh little we know: it's actually a vast, dangerous, immensely old alien construction that is slowly eating everything in its path. The Raiel have been trying to hold it back for a million years, and are only partially succeeding. Dozens of species, including humans from the Commonwealth, sit and watch it from a monitoring station on a planet several light years away.
Inigo arrives at this observation post trying to escape his heritage, and ends up with something he never bargained for: dreams of life inside the Void. His dreams, broadcast by a kind of neural empathy net, become akin to a religion and a couple of hundred years after his first dream, he has billions of followers, most of them wanting to journey into the Void themselves. Inigo disappears again, leaving his followers - now in control of entire planets and economies - in the hands of the Cleric Conservators. That latest one to be elected, Ethan, announces his intent to launch a Pilgramage fleet to the Void. This is something the Raiel, as well as various factions within the Commonwealth, aren't too keen on: they think it will cause a disastrous devourment phase.
Aaron witnesses Ethan announce the Pilgramage. He doesn't know much about himself. He certainly doesn't remember anything from before he arrived to watch. He just knows he has to stop the Pilgrimage, and to do that, he has to find Inigo. He's well-backed - plenty of currency, and plenty of very lethal hardware, the latter conveniently packed into his own body's enhanced cellular structure.
There are two main threads to The Dreaming Void. The first follows Aaron in a bloody trail across the Commonwealth as he attempts to track down the elusive Dreamer. The second thread, and the one that takes up about forty percent of the book, are transcripts of Inigo's first seven dreams, which follow the life of a young boy named Edeard, an inhabitant of a planet seemingly within the Void, as he makes the journey from lowly, but talented, apprentice in a small village, to the position of Constable in the planet's great city, Makkathran. Numerous other threads follow characters old (as in, familiar to those who've read the Commonwealth Saga) and new (admittedly one of them is unashamedly used to help those who didn't read the previous books to catch up on events) as they do the bidding of various factions of ANA - Advanced Neural Activity - a computer containing the minds of most of Earth's citizens that has become its official government. Then there's the Second Dreamer, someone that everyone wants to get their hands on.
Well, The Dreaming Void is typical Hamilton, that's for sure. Lots of sex, lots of big pretty toys, quite a bit of violence (Hamilton admits to reading Richard Morgan on his website, and Aaron reminds me a lot of Takeshi Kovacs!), a cast of thousands, story threads that just don't seem to have any relation to each other (yet). The dream sequences are a departure, and are a welcome and refreshing relief from the hectic pace of the Commonwealth. Edeard's world is a medieval one, slow-paced, where it takes a year to travel across the country in a caravan, and where guns (aside from certain frowned-upon telekenetic abilities) are the ultimate weapons.
A lot of what happened in the Commonwealth Saga is explained during the book, but it does help to have read them because whilst events are one thing, the motiviations behind some of the returning characters are only really mentioned in passing. (1500 years really isn't anything to the average Commonwealth citizen, after all they'd pretty much had mortality licked even back then - they've just refined things to a much greater extent!)
Flashbacks aside, there's very little wasted space. The plots are a lot more focused than the Commonwealth Saga, certainly more so than the Night's Dawn trilogy. It's a shame that Hamilton can't really come up with much more than a homogenised everyone's-happy picture of humanity (the Commonwealth is presented as being somewhat bland...) but at least he knows what he can and can't do, so stays away from politics and concentrates on action. In that way, the Commonwealth provides the devices by which his characters enjoy themselves - and there are some pretty nifty devices. Personally I don't see what the fuss is all about, I'll take a full set of Higher bionincs right now, thanks! What better way to lose weight than just telling my body that's what I want to do.
Everything's very neatly set up for the next book in the trilogy (provisionally title The Temporal Void. Events inside and outside the Void come to a head, and we're all left on tenterhooks waiting to see just what happens next. Personally, I can't wait.
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