The Fiction Dichotomy

It's been quite a while since I wrote anything significant about the books I was reading... that was probably the Steig Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, which took up far too many posts due to an excess of enthusiasm for a genre I'd never really tried reading before.

With Science Fiction, I'm on more familiar ground... Or so I thought, until I encountered Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction. It starts out all nice and properly Sci-Fi, with a maverick space trader discovering an important artifact of a long-dead alien race, and with some families arriving on a reasonably human-compatible world having been shipped there to turn it into a halfway decent colony, only for things to go tits-up when a weird satanist convict happens upon some weird energy-virus-thing that gives him terrible powers. The writing throughout is compelling, and actually became quite unnerving as the antagonist tortured people to open them up for possession, and the internal electronic systems of various soldiers started to malfunction under this malign influence...

...but all that forced a disconnect from the story, when I found myself wondering "why is there Supernatural Horror in this Sci-Fi story?"

Because this isn't possession by some weird alien energy virus, as it's first thought... it's possession by the eternal souls of long-dead humans, given inexplicable powers. And it gets weirder than that.

I'm currently about three quarters through the second book in what's called The Night's Dawn Trilogy, and one of the primary antagonists by this point is Al Capone, the Prohibition era American gangster, assisted by the futuristic equivalent of Lady Gaga. It's very confusing to have this level of batshit insanity in a Science Fiction story, even one which seems to be trying to explore some measure of theology by focusing on the nature of the afterlife. Bad enough when the souls of real people from real history are described as returning from some kind of purgatory from which they have been enviously observing life for millennia... but now the first major antagonist has discovered the existence of ghosts as well.

Yet, while all this weirdness is making me question why I'm continuing to read such a bizarre mixture of genres, the quality of writing and characterisation is keeping me utterly hooked. I want to know what happens next, even though I genuinely dislike the story.

It also helps that some elements - such as the human augmentations, the 'affinity' links between people and bio-mechanical machines, not least the Voidhawks and Blackhawks - are very interesting and well-implemented, and the 'living spacecraft' idea has intrigued me since Farscape, if not the likes of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who... novels. It's also unusual for a Science Fiction novel to acknowledge how ridiculously difficult it would be for fleets of spacecraft to effect a planetary invasion from another solar system except where the planet is wholly undefended, and that a space battle would tend to last a number of minutes if planned and executed in any sensible way, rather than the way movies tend to do it. There are also several stories going on at once, as one would expect from a novel that spans several galaxies, with the Possessed progressing their grand agenda, as well as a few fighting against it or, at least, progressing their own personal agendas instead, as the living come to terms with the terrible concept of the afterlife as described by the Possessed and struggle to find a way to contain them and, eventually, fight back against them... With one of the alien races hinting that fighting may not be the answer at all.

The thing about reading for oneself, rather than watching a TV show or a movie, is that the experience becomes less vicarious because it's playing out directly in your head rather than in front of your eyes... This series, so far, has been hitting all the right notes, even with the more outlandish characters. Their behaviour is believable, given their circumstances (which is rarely true of television these days, let alone movies!), and the galaxy-spanning implications of all areas and types of conflict involved are quite palpable.

So I guess it's bravo, Mr Hamilton...