The Reality Dysfunction (1996)

I think it is an absolute must for me to read at least one SPACE OPERA in my life. OMG

I hate this guy's writing. He needs an editor. He can't keep his tenses or his POVs straight, he shifts to passive voice in the middle of a fight for Pete's sake, and he doesn't check his facts.

Dear Peter F. Hamilton, there is no such thing as an Australian Marine, and most especially there is no such thing as an Australian Marine serving in the Vietnam war.

I can't think of many books I've had to force myself to finish as much as I did this one. Mostly to see how much worse it could get. ( )

Six-word review: Ponderous, overwrought futuristic space series opener.

Extended review:

I knew when I started this one that it was not just the first installment of a trilogy but the first half of the first book in a six-book "trilogy." So I did not expect a complete story arc with all plot developments resolved and all loose ends tied up.

I could also tell pretty quickly that I was not the primary intended audience. This passage from the opening battle scene (page 1) made that plain:

"His neural nanonics relayed information from the ship's external sensor clusters directly into his brain. Out here in the great emptiness of interstellar space starlight wasn't powerful enough to provide an optical-band return. He was relying on the infrared signature alone, arching smears of pinkness which the discrimination programs struggled to resolve. Radar pulses were fuzzed and hashed by the ships' electronic-warfare pods."

But still.

I expected that at some point there would at least be a focal character, some good guys and some bad guys, a challenge to overcome or a foe to defeat, a prize to win or lose.

Yet with a cast of thousands, it never became apparent in nearly 600 pages if there was a main character or even who the top ten contenders for the honor might be.

New characters were introduced by the barrelfull, chapter after chapter, page after page, right up until a few pages from the end, many of them dragging such bargeloads of information (age, appearance, attire, birthplace, personal background, social class, physical prowess, employment history, political affiliation) that you thought they had to be important, even while knowing you were never going to remember all that stuff--only to have them disappear after one mention and play no further part.

What's more, chapter after chapter introduced entire separate worlds, with different physical and atmospheric composition and characteristics, orbiting satellites, native species, natural resources, global governance, economics, social structures, etc., etc., etc., and vast technological scopes, complete with history, with the chemistry and physics of everything explained in encyclopedic detail. But there was no clue to which of these mattered to the story or why, or even if there was a story. It seemed as if the author was inventing for the sheer sake of invention, indiscriminately, just because he could.

One word for it might be exhaustive. Another might be exhausting.

I nearly gave up after six chapters and 124 pages, already weary of waiting for some constants of character, setting, and plot to emerge. After all, the author was working so hard. He must have had voluminous notebooks, charts, timelines, character bios, resources in hard science and speculative science, and much, much more. He was also exercising his thesaurus to death (although not always successfully). Surely this must all have been to some purpose.

In fact, I pressed on because I was just curious enough to want to see where the author was going with all this.

I never did.

Book one-half of three resolves nothing. It is just acres and acres of setup. And the prospect of thousands more pages of relentless exposition is more than I can face. At the end of 588 pages there is no character prominent enough about whom I care enough even to wonder what happens next.

Moreover, the writing has two flaws that I find intolerable. One is that it is rife with comma splices. My impression is that there are several on virtually every page. After a score of pages of that, I begin to feel short of breath. I can see why nobody gave this a careful, conscientious edit, but that doesn't mean it didn't need it.

Almost as if to balance this debit with a credit, the author generates sentence fragments--hundreds of them--as if he were paying a fee to pair subjects with predicates.

And the other flaw is that the author practically raises malapropism to a fine art. That thesaurus I mentioned? Time and again he makes a wrong word choice, as if picking from a list of near-synonyms without knowing which suited the case, or in some instances as if he just went with the first word he thought of and didn't give it so much as a second glance.

A few random examples:

"Enlistment offered a golden ticket offplanet, away from the rain, the heat, and the remorseless physical labor of the farms."

The word he reached for was "relentless." But he missed.

"Lori evinced a five-room building standing apart from the others."

In context he seems to mean "noticed."

"Outside Colsterworth the rolling countryside was a patchwork of small fields separated by immaculately layered hedges."

It simply makes no sense to say that hedges are purely and spotlessly layered.

I'll just add two more excerpts without comment:

"But while the Swithland {a boat} and her ilk were bland distaff inheritors utilizing technology instead of engineering craftsmanship, this grande dame could have been a true original."

and

"The colourful solid mirage sailed on regally down the river, its wake of joyous invocation tarrying above the brown water like a dawn mist."

You can find all of these with the "search inside" function on Amazon.


I gave the book two and a half stars and consider that generous. I recognize the tremendous effort that went into it. But as for the effort it would take to get something out of it--I leave that to hardier souls than I. ( )

I got to the part where a sentient spaceship had a college dorm-like philosophical discussion with its captain about the existence of souls, and my eyes got too tired from rolling to read any further. Puzzlnigly, a handful of LTers have this book tagged "hard sf." Maybe by "hard" they mean "hard to finish."

A great novel full of wondering science fiction and a huge cast of interesting characters. Really eager to continue the series with the next novel. Would definitely recommend for other sci-fi aficionados. ( )