The Evolutionary Void

I've heard it said that writers are a bit like magicians in that they rely on waving cloaks and misdirecting the readers attention to make an impression. I've also heard that magicians shouldn't show the same trick twice, because people will start catching on. This book felt like that repeated magicians trick. Maybe with less conviction than the first time (the Commonwealth books). I said the same about book two, and book three did not improve on it. Just wrapped things up so that my brain doesn't feel like it's missing something.
And now - a rant with spoilers. The last dream was such a let down. And it kept annoying me for all the rest of the book whenever the characters cited the last dream as proof of failure. The last dream supposedly showed that the "want for nothing" humans became lesser beings and the whole striving for utopia was therefore misguided. Well, I was not convinced in the least. First of all, I was confused why are this last generation not interested in things like "how their universe begun" or even star-travel. Where did they lose the human curiosity? And even if they somehow were these super-unmotivated, unchallenged beings, from "the last dream" I gathered they were super happy and content, which I think is a worthy achievement in itself.
It was annoying that the only conflict of these three books was "the void is going to devour us all". That by itself is a bad setup, because it forces everyone to work together to prevent that. And it's not like the void is a very interesting threat, at least not from the outside. Oh, there were a few villains thrown in there, but they were even more boring villains than the void: "Ooh, I'd like to restart the Universe because I suspect I might like the next one better." That's so ambiguous and thought provoking... "I don't care for my supporters either, in case you had any doubt whether I'm bad." Reading this last book was only marginally better than watching American cinema. It's one of those books that leaves me pondering on how much more it could have been if only it had done some things differently.

I really love Peter F. Hamilton's stories. I've read most of his books and even his short story collection A Second Chance at Eden. So it's probably fair to say that I am a biased reviewer of his books. It's also not a surprise that I enjoyed The Evolutionary Void. But the book (and the trilogy) had some problems.

The Evolutionary Void is the final part of a trilogy of books that Hamilton has written about what's referred to as the Commonwealth Universe. This following on from a duology where he introduced the setting. It's a space opera setting basically with highly technically evolved humans and other races. There's action, there's politics, there's sex, there's absurd numbers of characters. And behind it all there are big sci-fi ideas.

But Is It Hard SF?

Nope it's not. Get over it.

There's no shortage of science in Hamilton's science fiction, but a lot of it is broad extrapolation and some of it clearly veers off into fantasy. This is something that seems to matter an awful lot to a vocal minority of readers. But generally speaking if you enjoy Space Opera and don't mind books the size of a small mountain you should check this out.

Start at the beginning though.

What is Going On?

There's actually been a multi-year gap in my reading of this particular series. This book was actually published 4 or so years ago but I'm just getting round to reading it. But I read the previous two volumes before this one was published.

That delay has clearly made the situation worse, but I would argue that even with just the 3 year publishing timeline of the 3 books you would really be struggling to remember all the characters and factions and places and plotlines that are crammed into this story.

I actually had to check wikipedia for this one to clear up a couple of things I just could not remember.

I recently complained about excessive world building in epic fantasy. So it stands to reason I should criticise the exact same thing here. Right? Right?

Actually, it didn't bother me. The story is huge (and thus hard to keep track of) but it really didn't feel bloated. It was big because really big things were happening to a lot of people. But that's the distinction. Things were happening. The story was moving forward.

A Fantasy Story Inside a Space Opera

I'm a big fan of the fantasy genre. I probably actually read that more than I read science fiction. So you'd think that the concept of essentially having a fantasy story embedded inside the sci-fi story would be heaven for me.

Not so much. Honestly Edeard's story is the one that interested me the least of all the characters and plots that were going on, but he got quite a lot of time in this book again as he had in the previous one. The world of the void is sort of technically interesting to me, but I found those characters by far the most shallow and since Edeard's story only tangentially connects with the rest of the story I just didn't care as much as I was probably supposed to.

I had a similar reaction to Ozzie's never ending trek along the Silfen paths in the first Commonwealth books as well.

Wow That Was Sudden!

This was a trilogy of big books. It was a long story. And Hamilton clearly wasn't scared to give it the space he felt it needed. And yet at the end it wrapped up really quickly. So quickly in fact that I thought I must have missed a section.

I mean the major issues are resolved so it's not like I was left hanging. But lots of things are referenced as having happened without us seeing them. Which is weird because up to that point we saw everything. It just felt a bit like the author couldn't be bothered to have to go round and clean up after all his characters now that he was finished playing with them.

Who Is This For?

Do you enjoy space opera?
Do you like galaxy spanning and threatening adventures
The more characters the better?
Do you want big ideas to go with your big adventure?
This one's for you.

Did You Like It?

I loved it. I'm pretty much a fanboy when it comes to Peter F. Hamilton. I'm able to contain to the point I don't actually start drooling when I get a new book of his.

But yeah, buy them all and read them.