As usual with Hamilton's sci-fi, this starts out a bit slow as the characters are introduced and he sets the stage. This one features the Edenists - a group mind of humans that live with conscious technology - bitek and condemn religion; and the Adamists, with similar but non conscious technology that do not share a group mind and still believe in religion. Throw in a couple of alien races, some misfit Adamists and Edenists, a primitive new colony world, and what appear to be demons, and the rest of the book gets quite exciting. The characters haven't seen enough horror movies though! ( )

(Alistair) So, after enjoying Fallen Dragon as much as I did, I thought I'd give Peter F. Hamilton's big chunky series a try.

Not sure what I can say about this one yet, though. Unfortunately, what was originally published in the UK as three books (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God) was published in the US in six books, each volume being bisected at roughly the mid-point without - it seems to me - all that much care as to how it affected the rhythm of the plot.

As such, it's fairly hard to give this one a review alone, since it is in a literal sense half a book; and, in fact, almost all of its length is getting the background established, introducing the characters, and moving the pieces around on the board. The "OMG! They broke the universe!" moment doesn't come until the book's more than two-thirds over.

So I think I'm going to leave it with just this establishing note, and actually put the review-type stuff at the end of each book-pair, so that I'm considering them the way they're meant to be considered.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ce... ) ( )

A guilty pleasure... ( )

http://comunidadumbria.com/?ACCION=DF... ( )

It’s a decently intelligent read, though I wouldn’t classify it as a top S.F. book as some others do. My largest problem is with the setup. Did you notice the watching alien part I threw in the middle of that paragraph above? Yeah. There’s a floating alien observing species throughout the galaxy. It’s mostly invisible, and just happens to be there to spark the whole crisis. I don’t have a problem with a coincidence of Calvert being on the planet to play his part. There would be some captain who would be on the planet to play a part, so it makes sense to have it be him and build up to it with his story. But the invisible energy alien? Not a lot of sense there.

(Full review at my blog) ( )