slowfox | Voidhawks, The Lady Mac, Tranquility and Norkfolk Tears

glittertine prompted something like a geekgasm in me yesterday when she mentioned that she was reading The Reality Dysfunction. For the genuine effect, my comment there should be read outloud at about 600 words per minute, with no pauses. :-p

So, The Reality Dysfunction is the first instalment in Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, comprising The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God.

It's a fun read - Hamilton takes care with (most of) the physics, and I absolutely love love LOVE the setup and the world building that's going on. Hamilton has a vast array of characters, operating across a huge number of worlds attempting to counter a really evil threat that first emerges amongst a group of convicts on, if memory serves, Lalonde, a world famous for its legendarily tough wood Mayope (I hope I'm remembering this OK - it's been sooooooooooo long since I read the books (I read the first one in '96, I think)).

Anyway, our main hero, Josh, lives on Traquility, an O'Neill habitat (huge spaceborne cylinder that creates gravity for its inhabitants through spinning). I would jump at the chance to live on Tranquility, because it sounds like an awesome place (and amongst habitats, Tranquility has its own... uh, unique attributes), and not just because Ione's there.

I totally <3 Ione.

Josh has inherited his father's spaceship - the spacecraft in this universe have two basic models - there are the voidhawks, which are organic, and can 'swallow', that is, make interstellar jumps through wormholes, and there are the mechanistic spacecraft which are spherical in shape, because of the nature of the field generation they use to transport from A to B.

Anyway, Josh ends up on Lalonde (if I've remembered the planet's name correctly) picking up a load of wood to ship to Norfolk (a determinedly backwards planet, and everyone thinks that he's attempting to ship coals to Newcastle on this one) at the point where the whole evilness thing explodes. So naturally he's at (part of) the centre of the storm as the whole Confederate Universe comes under attack.

Sadly, Josh is a bit of a GaryStu, but the rest of the characters make up for this laziness, and if you disengage the brain, the trilogy is a hugely compelling, entertaining romp through the 26th Century.