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A Night Without Stars: A Review


 

Peter F. Hamilton’s A Night Without Stars is a sequel to The Abyss Beyond Dreams, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. Most of the story takes place many decades after the first book, so most of the characters are new. Though some characters come from the Commonwealth which has developed a functional version of immortality by downloading their brains into a new body or a machine body. But the people stuck on the planet Bienvenido have been sealed off from the Commonwealth for thousands of years (by their reckoning). Bienvenido is cut off from everything, having been cast out of the Void into intergalactic space.

I am glad that this takes place so far removed from the first book because Svlasta (the protagonist from that book) grew increasingly hard to like as that book progressed. Thankfully he is long dead before most of the events of this book take place. And yet, we find ourselves with another troubling protagonist in A Night without Stars. Chaing is a security officer. His fanaticism to the cause is troubling but his coworker Jenifa, is even worse. Fortunately, there are other point-of-view characters that we actually want to win, and we get to spend a lot of time with them.

One of Hamilton’s strengths is world building.  There is a rich, complex cast of characters, and you are never able to predict where the story is going. Are they going to get out of this apocalypse? If so, how? When I found myself running my expectations forward, I was inevitably surprised by where the story went. I also like that the characters are in shades of gray. There are good guys and bad guys but (with only a couple of exceptions) the good guys are not all good and the bad guys are not all bad. This makes the characters more interesting and less predictable. One notable exception is the character of Jenifa who is rather ambiguous at the start of the novel, but by the end is an over-the-top mustache-twirling villain. This is a bit out of step with the rest of Hamilton’s writing. But this is a minor problem with all the rich characters to follow.

In The Commonwealth Series, of which this pair of books is a part, the technology is so far advanced from ours that it can be a bit hard to take in. But these two books take place (for the most part) on a world that has been technologically stunted and is only now beginning to build things like telephones and rockets. Contact with others from outside this world leads to inevitable resistance and culture shock. But the world of Bienvenido needs help from the outsiders if it is going to survive. Those in power tend to have closed minds. Even when their survival hangs in the balance, they stubbornly mistrust the outsiders. The question becomes: can they get over their mistrust enough to let the Commonwealth people help? I can see parallels to current politics where the sides are so deeply entrenched. I suspect that is not by accident.

Hamilton writes space opera on a grand scale, and this one did not disappoint.

Star Liner


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