Peter F Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction

To be fair @Bick I think the Reality Dysfunction probably has his weakest ending which is probably why I prefer his later works. The length of them can certainly be off putting but I don't really have an issue with that since everyone seems to be producing series these days and series are really only serialised long books anyway! So long as they're not all padding I'm happy and I've never really found that to be the case with Hamilton at least not when I compare with some of the padding I see from other well known authors even when they're writing much shorter books.

If you did like Reality Dysfunction then I really would recommend giving the first two Commonwealth books - Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained a try and see how you feel about them. Personally I think they were significantly better than the Reality Dysfunction books and had a stronger conclusion.
 
1st post hello! I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Mindstar series, which I prefer. With the Reality Dysfunction I almost put books 2 and 3 down but kept coming back for the action more than anything. Pandora's star was excellent as well.
 
Erik said:
1st post hello! I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Mindstar series, which I prefer. With the Reality Dysfunction I almost put books 2 and 3 down but kept coming back for the action more than anything. Pandora's star was excellent as well.
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I enjoyed the Mindstar books but I'd say that his writing has matured a lot since then.
 
Yes you do definitely need to read both or not at all. The way to look at it is to imagine it is a 6 part series packed into two books. :D (Not that different to A song of Ice and Fire where each volume is of a similar length). But I do understand how it can be off putting to many.
 
And of course if you do like the Commonwealth saga, then there is the Void trilogy which follows on from this, although is not directly related to the original books. I actually preferred the Void trilogy of the Commonwealth books, although knowing what I know now I am tempted to go back and give the whole lot a re-read!
 
Gnrevolution said:
And of course if you do like the Commonwealth saga, then there is the Void trilogy which follows on from this, although is not directly related to the original books. I actually preferred the Void trilogy of the Commonwealth books, although knowing what I know now I am tempted to go back and give the whole lot a re-read!
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And now there's the Chronicles of the Fallers as well (I've read the first one). I think I also preferred the Void trilogy to Pandora's Star and co. but it's been a long time since I read them. I too have considered a re-read but with the length of the books it would be a serious undertaking! :)
 
I've read a lot of Peter F Hamilton's stuff, I read his first short story published in FEAR magazine in 1988, subsequently edited and retconned to fit the Night's Dawn universe and published in the book of short stories A Second Chance at Eden. I thought that the Night's Dawn trilogy was good, but not exceptional. It reminded me of Harry Turtledove and Stephen king's work in some ways, with sprawling character arc's across multiple volumes, strange asides and plot strands that went nowhere. The sex scenes I found old fashioned and there was an air of Golden Age "capable man" tropes that I found outdated and to be honest, boring. Overall though I enjoyed it, except the ending which was awful, along with Dan Simmon's The Terror it probably has the worst ending of any novel I've read, for different reasons though. Hamilton's was a Deus Ex Machina of improbably stupid proportions and Simmon's just fizzled out.

Much better was the Pandora's Star duology, I really enjoyed these books. He reined it in, got on with the story and gave us an astonishingly good protagonist to boot. Although the Void trilogy was also good (set in the same commonwealth universe) I felt it did have some of the same fault's as the Night's Dawn trilogy but without the bad sex.

Great North Road was a good novel and The abyss Beyond Dreams, the first in his Fallers duology had some great/strange/weird ideas in it. Peter F Hamilton seems to get better with age!

The early Greg Mandel trilogy is enjoyable light weight reading but the less said about Misspent Youth the better.

I've not read Fallen Dragon, (although it's on my shelf) or his new YA series but I will definitely read Night Without Stars when it comes out in September.

As an aside, being a book collector, Hamilton takes up far to much space, and the hardbacks are difficult to read!
 
zaltys13 said:
Hamilton takes up far to much space,
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that he does, but he's usually worth it:whistle: he's one of the few authors I used to automatically buy, although I've downgraded him since the void trilogy, just because I got ignored with the 'fantasy' element getting in the way of the sf, which is, I know, very unfair.
I like both Fallen Dragon and GNR. They're page turners like the best of the Nights Dawn trilogy, but each was well written with their own selling points. FD was a detailed look at that chestnut exoskeleton armour, and GWR a great police procedural with (I thought) a unique singularity.
I will always look at his latest, but I'm a modern reader - I want to be able to read the whole thing without having to wait :D, and having to sometimes has reduced my appetite - which says more about me as a reader than him as a writer :confused:

ABS
 
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