Teaser

The apocalypse is nigh. Countless souls return from the dead and run rampant across a fractured Confederation. In the face of such horrors, what hope do mere mortals have . . ?

Review

The good news is about the final act in Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy is that it is an improvement over The Neutronium Alchemist. The bad news is that the damage has already been done. Al Capone and his magic penis may be relegated to a supporting role in these closing stages, but this book still lives in the shadow of earlier choices. The main improvement here is that we finally get some forward momentum. Two and a half thousand words into a series, you’d expect no less. However, it really is a case of too little too late. There is simply not enough in these thousand pages for me to recommend reading the preceding two volumes.

Instead of dwelling on the negatives, I want to talk about reading long series. Granted, this is only a trilogy, but it has enough of a page count for three times as many books. Specifically, I want to talk about abandoning a series.

You’ve probably heard of the sunk cost fallacy, wherein a person continues to invest in something based purely on the fact that they have already invested. I definitely fall into this when it comes to books. I don’t DNF individual books because a) I have paid for them, and b) even the worst books can teach us something about the sort of books we should look into in the future. If you never read a bad book, you’d probably assume you enjoyed all books, which is never the case. Once a book is complete, however, I have no problem dropping a series. For example, after not enjoying Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space, I decided the series was not for me, and didn’t read the subsequent volumes. However, should Reynolds put out a new short story collection, I’d likely pick it up. Conversely, I enjoy David Weber’s Honor Harrington series enough to keep reading, but not enough to grab every little anthology set in the same canon.

When it comes to Peter F. Hamilton, I’ve read many bits and pieces, but this is the first time I’ve persevered through a whole series. Each of his books has something to offer, though there is also plenty to keep me hesitant about taking the plunge. If I hadn’t seen the entire trilogy on eBay, I probably wouldn’t be reading it. Yet see it I did, and so I have the whole set. As you can probably gather by now, if I buy a book, I read it. It’s just who I am. Even when it’s not good for me. I do, as it happens, have another Hamilton book on my TBR. Everyone seems to agree that Pandora’s Star is his best work, but I’m going to hold off on reading it for a while yet.

At the time of The Naked God‘s publication, Peter F. Hamilton was the best selling science fiction author in Britain. Nearly four thousand pages later, I’m left wondering why that was.

Book Stats

• The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (#3)
• Published by Pan in 1999
• 1244 Pages