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.
Comments
Post a Comment