Judas UnchainedPeter Hamilton basically writes one kind of book as far as I can tell — these big sci-fi space opera stories with lots of characters, big ideas, big plot arcs, and lots of action. These aren’t books you pick up casually and read a few pages before you go to sleep. First of all, it will take you months to finish, and more importantly, you won’t remember what’s going on. Writing one kind of book isn’t a bad thing; I like this kind of immersive reading experience. But it does take a certain level of commitment, particularly at almost 1000 pages.

This is the second book in a series that started with Pandora’s Star and will continue with “The Dreaming Void” later this year.

The big challenge for me with this novel is that Hamilton doesn’t provide a lot of hooks for the reader to pick up on what is by this point a complex and interrelated set of narratives and characters. I put the book down twice before I finally got “over the hump” enough to remember who was who and what was happening. Most of the characters continue, but some who were central are now on the periphery, and others move the to fore. While perhaps dated, books like this really need a precis or something to remind readers of “What Has Gone Before”. I would have enjoyed the early part of this much more had I not been scratching my head quite so much.

That said, I do like Hamilton’s writing, and this doesn’t disappoint. When things get going its a real page-turner. I feel somewhat guilty about enjoying this stuff, since it feels a little “fluffy”, but its a smart, sexy kind of fluff, with wormholes, genocidal aliens, mysterious aliens, sentient planet-size computers, and star-destroying super bombs. How can that not be cool?

That said, 1000 pages makes one think that an editor could have been involved a bit more.  Could one have written a tighter 750 page novel?  There’s nothing that earth-shattering here that requires so much space to work out.

Language is also a bit of a problem here:  Hamilton tends to rely a bit too heavily on the hoary sci-fi technique of using noun modifiers to establish the “alternate” context.  So for example every time we see the word “concrete” we get “enzyme-bonded” in front to remind us that, yes indeed, this is science fiction. Woo!  Do I really care?  Do you need to remind me after this long what the context is?