Book of the Week: Mindstar Rising.

Peter Hamilton’s near-future, somewhat cyberpunk techno-thriller Mindstar Rising is the first book of a trilogy, but it’s a good trilogy, so that’s all right.  You’re probably going to roll your eyes at the global warming stuff — it was written in 1993, and Hamilton assumed that right about now climate change would have gotten so bad that the United Kingdom would have been taken over by a bunch of filthy Stalinist Commies* — but it’s a good thriller and the computer tech holds up pretty well.  The psionic stuff, not so much, but that’s how it goes. Continue reading Book of the Week: Mindstar Rising.

Book of the Week: The Evolutionary Void.

Possibly I shouldn’t encourage Peter Hamilton by picking a book like The Evolutionary Void as Book of the Week – it’s not exactly encouraging him to stop writing 700+ page hard SF books only once a year – but he’s demonstrated a slightly distressing ability to get away with it. Such is life.

Adieu, I Shall Wear Midnight. It was fun.

Looking for someone to read (Peter Hamilton)

(Today’s author: Peter Hamilton)

I’m currently going through The Temporal Void (second book in his Void Trilogy), so I thought that I should mention his works generally.  Peter Hamilton’s one of the more interesting science fiction authors out there: while his work is definitely part of the ‘hard space opera’ tradition, he’s also ready to play with some quite heretical tropes – at least, heretical for hard SF.

Case in point: his Night’s Dawn Trilogy explores the reaction of an interstellar civilization to empirical proof of the existence of an afterlife, particularly when its inhabitants start escaping from it en masse.  His Mindstar trilogy (based in a globally-warmed, post-Communist, future Great Britain) is likewise ostensibly one genre (cyberpunk), but one that has been modified heavily in order to make it plausible that anybody would actually live in it voluntarily.  And the trilogy that I’m reading now is a sequel to the two-book series Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, which rather sneakily inserts elves into a classic alien war scenario without anyone quite noticing until it was over and done with.

They’re big, fat books, and quite fun. Check them all out.