Great North Road (utgåvan 2013)

I think the only reason I don't give this book 5 stars is because I did not love the ending. It was fine, but seemed to come suddenly out of nowhere. Otherwise, Hamilton, along with Alistair Reynolds and Iain M Banks, continues to be one of my favorite world-builders. The world he has created it detailed and interesting, although it is quite similar to the world of the Commonwealth Saga. ( )

Great book. Long but a wonderful to read. I really enjoyed the story, but still I felt like there was something tiny missing. The cherry that would have made that a solid 5 star book. Still I highly recommend it. ( )

Despite being a Peter F. Hamilton fan, I have a confession to make – I never could get into the Reality Dysfunction. I loved the tech, I thought the characters were great, I just couldn’t wrap my brain around the dead coming back through a dimensional rift. It just smacked of cheesy, especially when Al Capone made his appearance.

I started the Great Road North was some trepidation – Hamilton can be hit or miss in my experience – and was pleased to find a good story, if a touch repetitive of previous works. Hamilton has returned to the kind of story that made Paula Myo so awesome. Blending crime and aliens is a successful formula for Hamilton, so it’s only natural that he would return to those roots in this story. The setting for this tale is familiar – set a century or so into the future, the advent of a portal technology has allowed man to spread across the galaxy. At the pinnacle of the economic paradise are the North’s, a family of successive generations of clones. When a North washes up dead, it’s big news. When it’s the second clone to be murdered in a uniquely grisly way in twenty years, and the last suspect was an alien with knives for fingers, things begin to get interesting.

Hamilton deftly weaves together the stories of Sid, a Newcastle detective on the trail of a murderer, and Angela, the sole surviving witness of the first encounter, 9 light years from Earth on the trail of the alien monster that no one else believes exists. Hamilton litters the page with a small supporting cast that are rarely thin or cardboard, and always seem to offer us a little more insight into our main characters.

The only fault I have with the novel is that we’ve been here before. This isn’t the Commonwealth, and these aren’t the same characters, but the themes are reminiscent of Hamilton’s other books. A great read, and definitely fills an itch for a space opera with killer monsters, but not his best. ( )

I'm afraid that this huge doorstopper of a novel is going to be one of those love-hate jobs. I now only love it after having finished it, but I felt my stamina drain and drain and drain through long long passages of mind-numbing boredom and a litany running through my head went, "Where is the editor? Why can't these last 150 pages be safely omitted without losing any story whatsoever?"

*sigh* It's rather the same problem I had with [b:The Reality Dysfunction|45245|The Reality Dysfunction (Night's Dawn, #1)|Peter F. Hamilton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1331274659s/45245.jpg|747250], although, to be very fair, I think this one was the superior of the two.

For one, the whole North thing was highly amusing. They're a clan of clones who had built one hell of an empire. The worldbuilding was frankly amazing, too. The amount of depth and creation was awe-inspiring, although, to be realistic, it was mostly filled with names and places and huge Zanthswarm worries, so we can mostly just chalk that up to consistency and organizational charts. After all is said and done, everything appears in order. All the long passages of time spent in either the present where things don't seem to be getting anywhere, or the even longer time spent in flashbacks that were, to my built understanding, already gone over fairly well in present dialog.

And here's where my complaints come in.

For ninety percent of this huge novel, we were treading over slightly shifting ground, either past or present. It was only very late in the reading that I realized that the MAIN MAIN MAIN character was Angela. The murder mystery was actually rather entertaining, with all the complicated issues of discovering who or what was behind the murder of a North, but I only had the vague sensation that a slightly important bit player, Angela, was something special.

I'm here to tell you now, dear reader, to just ignore everyone else and focus on her. The other stories are fine, but in the end, they all just revolve around her. You can say that all roads lead to Angela, and you'd be just fine.

You see, that's the problem with a novel that is allowed to be so freaking huge and detailed and dense to develop a life of its own. It's hard to tell who's most important. I believed Sid and the investigation was the most important. I believed it for a freaking long time. And then a painfully long backstory for a minor character dominates the novel. And other long backstories of others start cropping up. And then more long backstories start growing like some intelligent plant that has grown to be the most genetically dominant life form of a whole planet, driving away all animal and insect life. (Whoa, where did that come from? Oh hell. It's a spoiler. Sorry.)

What should I say to anyone struggling to get through this novel as they hit these wtf moments?

Patience. Just have patience. I wanted to DNF it. I really did. But since I just don't pull that crap, I flogged myself to stay on target.

What do you know? It paid off. Everything converged and wove a pretty awesome tapestry of coolness. I sure as hell got a huge primer on Angela. I even enjoyed the detailed existence of all those Norths.

Another problem: Maybe I'm just a shallow reader, but I probably would have reacted better and had my flagging attention sit up straighter had I known that such cool action and conflict and Important Shit was happening later on both the Earth and St. Libra. The BIG THINGS THAT HAPPEN could have been intimated earlier, such as when the murder investigation stalled. A Really Big Hook would have revved my engines right about then.

Reader advisory: Things Do Get Cool.
*If you're patient. If you're patient.*

And after all is said and done, I STILL think a liberal dose of a red pen would have done this novel a great justice.

That being said, I'm still giving it a 4 star because the opening, great swaths of the story, and the ending were all pretty damn cool. Do you like clones and aliens? Do you like epic invasions and being an invader? Do you like murder mysteries and questioning the nature of humanity? Well good! You'll probably like this novel. It's nothing if not ambitious as fuck.

( )

This is a monumental book in lots of ways, not just its length (1087 pages) or its size (slightly larger than a house brick), but also in the story that he writes here.

It starts with a murder, and the body that is fished out of the river is a North, a family of genetic clones, and this corpse has had all the identity markers removed. There are five puncture marks on the chest, and the heart has been shredded. The last people to die this way did so 20 years ago, on the colony of St Libra, and the woman who was tried for the murders is still in prison. So begins the most sensitive, and politically charged investigation of Sidney Hurst’s career.

With the new murder, the HDA decide that they need to go back to St Libra and fully investigate the claim by Angela that the murders were committed by an alien. She is pulled from prison and sent through the gateway, essentially a wormhole, with a crack team of legionnaires and back to St Libra to find this entity.

And so starts this epic story. It flips between Newcastle, and St Libra and you follow the ebb and flow of the characters in their successes and failures. The people on St Libra start to conclude that the plant they are on is a bioformed planet, and the alien is there as a guardian. St Libra‘s sun suddenly red shifts, sending the planet into a mini ice age, and the alien starts to eliminate the legionnaires in the group. Meanwhile back on earth the investigation into the murder has become a lot more complex and charged, and it starts to look like the fall out between two corporations, and the police are playing catch up.

Apart from the fact that this is enormous, and took even me a while to read, I really enjoyed it. He has created a pair of believable worlds, alien contact and a murder mystery thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t get five stars as there are parts that I felt were superfluous to the main story, and probably could have been removed.

Hamilton manages to keep the tech believable, there are e-i systems that people have fitted within their body and are permanently connected to the net. There are lots of smart dust and meshes that the police use to track and monitor citizens. The society is well constructed too, apart from petty crime, most of the serious crime is committed by corporations that have a legitimate side, and a nefarious side.
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