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Peter Hamilton is vying to be one of the big names in British SF, and with this big book - well over 900 pages long - painted on the big canvas of classic space opera’s wide-screen baroque, he may just have made it.
It’s the end of the 26th century. The human race has gone to the stars, and now inhabits more than 800 worlds, plus an unknown number of asteroids and space habitats. An uneasy peace exists between the genetically engineered Edenists and resolutely unaltered Adamists. Intelligent biological starships, voidhawks, and their mechanical cousins leap between the stars in a matter of seconds, "swallowing the void" in artificial wormholes. It’s definitely not an Iain Banks utopia out there: resources are still scarce, and wars are fought, with people dying screaming in the cold hard vacuum.
Hamilton sets the scene by throwing us in at the deep end. It’s the middle of a nasty little war, and a flotilla of starships is taking a star-killing secret weapon and its creator on a pre-emptive strike. Light years from the nearest star, in a scene worthy of Industrial Light and Magic’s most expensive effects, the ships are ambushed, ravaged, and left for dead.
Three tales lie at the heart of The Reality Dysfunction - each big enough to be a novel in its own right. The first starts several years after the ambush, when a voidhawk comes home to an Edenist habitat orbiting Saturn to mate in the rings and die in glorious flames. Its captain’s children will become its children’s captains. One forms a stronger than normal bond with her living ship. In the years to come, the human Syrinx and her voidhawk Oeone are destined to become legends.
Elsewhere, in the shattered ruins of an archipelago of alien space habitats, Joshua Calvert is hunting for artefacts, trying to strike it lucky, so he can rebuild his inheritance: his dead father’s starship Lady Macbeth. When he finds the flash frozen body of one of the Ring’s builders, his fortune’s made, and he can fulfil his dream of becoming a starship captain.
Lalonde is a new world, a fresh start for those who’ve left Earth’s teeming arcologies far behind - and a Botany Bay for transported criminals. It’s a low-tech agricultural world, where farmers carve a living out of the rain-forest. Unfortunately for the latest batch of colonists, their little jungle village is destined to be the epicentre of the end of their world - and possibly 800 other worlds as well.
While Joshua Calvert is learning what it means to be a starship captain, and Syrinx is finishing a term in the Confederation Navy, something strange is happening on Lalonde. A group of transported street kids has triggered what might be an attack by a renegade scientist armed with nano-technological weapons. Or is it an invasion of alien bodysnatchers… or perhaps it’s just demonic possession.
As Hamilton wraps these three tales around each other, we start to see the big picture: why the aliens of the Ruin Ring died, and what the eponymous reality dysfunction that drove them to suicide means to the embattled colonists on Lalonde. As the story builds to an explosive climax, a priest, an investigative journalist and handful of children are the only people left to tell the galaxy at large what has actually invaded the human Confederation, and to guide our heroes and heroines into the inevitable volume two.
The Reality Dysfunction is a worthy follow up to Hamilton’s three successful Greg Mandel novels. Its mix of star-spanning intrigue and men with big guns will give the American space operas a run for their money, and the climactic cross genre slide into horror is a brave move that succeeds spectacularly. There are another two books to come in this series, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, and I can’t wait for the next one. - even if it is going to be this big!
Originally published in SFX and quoted on US and UK covers.
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