Subject: Review: "The Reality Dysfunction" by Peter F. Hamilton

From: "John Shiali" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Aug 1997 12:45:35 GMT

"The Reality Dysfunction" by Peter F. Hamilton
		Review Copyright 1997 John Shiali

The year is 2600 AD.  Hundreds of colonised planets span the galaxy,
everything from low-tech gardens of Eden, to high-tech synthetic asteroids
where people have been surgically enhanced, to races where they have spent
centuries altering their genetic lines.  Planetoids may be sentient,
Captains are born in tandem with their organic craft and share a
telepathic link, zero-gee sailors have their legs removed and another pair
of arms grafted on instead.  Mankind is about to realise it's potential to
become anything it wants to be.

Then, on a backwater agricultural planet, an invisible alien observer, not
quite on our plane of existence, gets a little too close when a criminal
is lynched.  Now a doorway has been held open between this world and
wherever you go after death, and whatever is in there wants life back
desperately.  Like a disease, sequestration spreads from one person to
another, bodies being taken over by those who have previously died, but
now find that they have a chance to live again, and nothing seems to be
able to stop them.

Just like Larry Niven's "Known Space," and Iain M. Banks' "Culture"
novels, Peter F.  Hamilton has succeed in creating the huge sweeping vista
of a star-spanning race ,with many societies, where the only constant is
diversity.  Hamilton makes the background fully fleshed out and deep; you
want to read the book to find out more about the setting he has used, and
yet it is all very different from Banks or Niven.  Just when you though
that nobody could better the "Culture" without stealing some of Banks'
ideas, Hamilton has proved that it can be done and done well.

Where Hamilton makes a real departure is in the number of plotlines and
how he handles them.  Rather than following a main plot and maybe a couple
of sub-plots, Hamilton has around a dozen plots on the go at any one time
-- imagine an eight hour mini-series starring a cast of hundreds of top
name actors and thousands of extras.  You are introduced to characters,
and learn a little about them and what is happening to them.  Then you
switch to a different plotline for a while.  Then a third, and then back
to the first one for a while.  You have to concentrate on several
storylines at once, and see how they fit into the big picture of what is
going on in Hamilton's universe.  Sometimes you see part of a plotline or
character from an unusual angle as two plotlines interact.  You may follow
a character for a while, interspersed with other stories, right up to the
point of where you know they are going to be sequestered.  That character
may then make a brief appearance in another plotline and never be seen again.

Although this is a demanding format for the reader -- but not as difficult
as Banks' "Feersum Endjinn" -- it is worth persevering.  As you have a
complete view on what is happening, and can link different information
from different plotlines, you find yourself mentally shouting at the
characters, trying to help them beat the odds.  It is just like when your
favourite film character goes back into the basement and you know that the
homicidal knife-wielding manic is down there.  Hamilton manages to keep
you engrossed and following the plotlines, even through the book's mammoth
length of almost a thousand pages.  I've seen US paperback imports that
have been sliced into multiple volumes, but the UK paperback is the same
as the hardback i.e., massive.

I don't know if there will be follow-up books, but there is no resolution
to the overall plotline so it seems likely that there will be another
volume of at least the same length before we can find out if Hamilton's
universe beats the sequestration that threatens to overwhelm it.  If you
start this story you are commiting to more than the initial thousand
pages, but however long it takes, this is a journey you must take if you
read science-fiction.  Where Hamilton's Greg Mandel books showed an
evolving and sharpening talent, "The Reality Dysfunction" puts him on the
map with Iain M.  Banks with such a bang that you have to wonder if he
snuck off to some Tibetan monastery and has come back as a master of the
art.  Hamilton produces a virtuoso performance - a book that will
alternately have your mouth hanging open or banging your fists on the
table in frustration that you can't tell the characters what you know in
order to help them out.  Make sure you get to experience it too.

%A	Hamilton, Peter F.
%T	Reality Dysfunction, The
%D	1996
%G	ISBN  0-333-63427-6
%C	London, UK
%I	Macmillan General Books Ltd.
%O	hardback 16.99 UKP
%P	955 pp
 
 John - 
Darth Vader wears lace panties!