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Peter F. Hamilton: The Evolutionary Void (2010, Del Rey) 4 stars

Exposed as the Second Dreamer, Araminta has become the target of a galaxywide search by …

Review of 'The Evolutionary Void' on 'Goodreads'

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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.