I have just finished reading The Evolutionary Void, the final book in Peter F Hamilton's Void Trilogy, itself a sequel to The Commonwealth Saga.
The two books of The Commonwealth Saga combined an epic, galaxy spanning plot, an original and frightening enemy, and some great action set pieces. The Void Trilogy novels were flabby, pondering and with a very unclear threat supposedly driving the narrative. Annoyingly, Hamilton kept just enough of the story moving along for me to want to finish the series. Well, that and the investment I had already made in reading the 1,200 pages of the first two books.
Before I go on, I have to point out Hamilton's obsession with food and the meals his characters eat. These characters live for a thousand years, travel in starships that travel at hundreds of times the speed of light – but we learn more about the ideal accompaniment to a lemon risotto than we ever do about what these ultra-lives and ultra-drives mean for a civilisation of billions.
The novels have a split narrative, jumping between the happy, materially rich world of The Commonwealth; and the dream world of the Void. In the Void, young Edeard learns to manipulate his telekenetic and telepathic skills to shape his community, eventually becoming mayor of a large, ancient city-state, and turns into a bit of a megalomaniac along the way. The life of Edeard, also know as the Waterwalker, is telepathically shared and revered by people of the Commonwealth and a grand plan to move millions of his followers into the Void, known as The Living Dream, is hatched. Unfortunately, doing so will cause the Void to consume our galaxy.
I never felt that the threat posed by The Void was made clear until the third book in the series. Likewise, I couldn't really see why the citizens of the Commonwealth were so enamoured of Edeard's life. Yes, he was brave, honest, and could do cool things with his mind – but the technology existed to make all of this possible to Commonwealth citizens as well. Edeard's story was interesting enough, but could easily have been cut substantially.
There were too many characters to keep track of – many of whom first appeared in Pandora's Star, and many of these extra characters served no real purpose. Their plot threads could have been cut out with no loss, or reduced to a mere paragraph of backstory. Given that I waited for the paperback of The Evolutionary Void to come out, I'd forgotten who most of them were.
Another failing of the series is Hamilton's happiness to invent technology wherever it suits. In the Commonwealth Saga, a complex wormhole network joined the major planets, allowing instantaneous travel on trains. It was neat, consistently presented, and the consequences and challenges of such a technology were explored in the two books. But by the Void Trilogy, it's all hyperdrives and ultradrives, quantumbusters and gaiamotes. Need to go faster? Just invent a new class of starship. Ships too clunky? Teleportation through T-Spheres, whatever they are, will do. Everybody is enhanced through bionic weapons and shields, with no reference to how they might be powered or how excess heat would be channelled. Each new starship has a better level of stealth, which of course can be detected by the subsequent starship. And if all this technology is getting too much for you, just ascend to a post-physical life form (you may need a wormhole and a star to make it happen, but that's OK, they're easy enough to come by).
The entire trilogy would have been better served being cut down to a single volume, a stand-alone novel set in the same universe as the Commonwealth Saga.
Hamilton's next book is the short-story collection Manhattan in Reverse. Here's hoping that he can actually write a Short Story – but at 3,200 pages for the anthology, I have my doubts.