It's too bad that Hamilton tries to weave 2 stories together; Indigo's dreams would be a great read without the Greater Commonwealth stuff (and vice versa). Now both stories seem lacking; only when a plotline goes on for a while (or is linked to an other plotline in a clear way) the book gets really interesting. All in all it was a nice read, but I've read better from Hamilton. And only because Edeard kicks ass the rating is a 3 out of 5, else it would've been a 2 out of 5. ( )

The Temporal Void is the middle book in an incredible trilogy, which has, as its background, the previous trilogy that covered events some 700 years earlier.
Hamilton's writing style is enthralling, graphic and yet simple at the same time. Readers are assumed to have a good enough memory to remember the background from previous books (and the previous series), yet the prior works are used to augment the tale unfolding rather than rely on them.
Hamilton's tales tell a story where the "science" is just... accepted. Poor sci-fi "glorifies" in the technology, but that's not the case with Hamilton's books. Instead, it blends into the tale.
What's particularly shocking and fascinating about this story is the way that entire races - and factions within races - are attempting to out-maneuvre each other, and how completely unprepared some of them are, even after planning of centuries.
Love it. ( )

As a genre, SF was rated even lower than pulp fiction, on a par with War Comix and Photo-Stories: bad Science Fiction is truly dire, but Speculative Fiction can be sublime – imaginative, prophetic and completely untrammeled.

‘The Temporal Void’ is the latest offering by Peter Hamilton, whom the cover assures us is ‘Britain’s number one science fiction writer’, and at over 700 pages represents about 14 hours of sheer reading torture.

It is the second in a trilogy, something the publisher’s blurb, unforgivably, failed to mention, and to make sense of it requires reading “The Dreaming Void’, the first in the sorry saga, no doubt weighing in at another 700 odd pages of tedium. Avoid. ( )