Peter F. Hamilton

This book single handedly made me stop reading sci-fi/fantasy for several years, which I guess I should be thankful for. The ending to this book and series is honestly one of the most incomprehensibly badly written endings to any book I've ever seen, and it was especially stunning given how highly regarded this series seems to be. The series itself is full of misogyny, has a blatant self insert as a main character who every woman finds super sexy and who solves everything amazingly perfectly but it has enjoyable moments and although the set up is kind of ridiculous there are some cool ideas - the series has REALLY cool aliens, comparatively, who are actually sketched interestingly and I really liked the scenes they were in. And then. You get to the ending of this. And it makes everything that came before come that much worse. Details are somewhat hazy 6 years from when I read it but what actually happened was at least as absurd as what I say.

The ending is a literal deus ex machina. Fair enough, it's telegraphed throughout the book. But. So they find this thing which is literally like a kind of god. And it's also like some sort of genie wishing thing. And then of course the main character "takes responsibility" for resolving the plot. And he becomes god for a while. And it's the most macho thing. He's got the perfect brain to not go ~mad with power~ apparently and so he just does the necessary "common sense" things. One of the things of the book is that each alien species has to deal eventually with all the dead people who are trapped in the other dimension, they have to find some way to soothe their pain and let them carry on. So what does main character do? He does something dimensionally so all the dead who are possessing human bodies are sent back into the afterlife. IIRC they go to the "good" afterlife this time but there's a specific point about humans "not being responsible" enough or something so they couldn't do things "properly" but it was an absurd solution to a big built up point and to the entire plot of the books - like 2 pages "right they're gone now we don't have to deal with that, thanks god". There's also a plot thread about one of the alien species preparing to invade human planets. This is solved by all the human planets being moved far away to a different part of the galaxy. They're also made closer together to reduce fuel problems. No, seriously. All the plot points in the books which have been built up over and over are just done, 10 pages max. All the dead characters we've seen before? No serious goodbyes, they just go. And main character gets his perfect dream life where he gains superhuman powers too. Woooo. Great book.

I realised after reading this that so much sci-fi is like this - crappy self insert character with a bad plot that even if it has good ideas or good "world building" inevitably fizzles out in an awful way, after way too much writing. It was a good wake up call. Don't read this series. Oh and another thing - the entire second book is almost 100% irrelevant - the big plot point throughout the book gets tossed right near the end and barely anything else actually happens… (mer)

I've read this and Judas Unchained three times now (over at least 15 years), and feel like I'm starting to get a handle on them. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, and a lot of story lines, weaving in and out of each other to make a wonderful pattern. The Police Detective, Paula Myo, sticks out in my memory. When I first encountered her this time around, I found myself getting excited for her part of the story. Melanie Roscorro, on the other hand, I found to be way more cringy than I remembered. She had most of the sex scenes, which were more explicit than they needed to be to service the story.

I'm looking forward to reading the duology again some day. I'm getting old, and not usually interested in revisiting books, but these had so much going on that I think I will enjoy them at least one more time.… (mer)