Catching Up With Peter F Hamilton

Peter F. Hamilton World Fantasy Convention 2013

While I've long been in awe of Peter F. Hamilton, I've only read a fraction of his novels. That seems unconscionable, given how highly I esteem his stories. Mostly, I'm familiar with him because of The Night's Dawn Trilogy. In the United States, the first two novels were split in half, and published as four mass market paperbacks in the late 1990s. The third and fourth halves of the story appeared a year after the first two. That's an acceptable interval between books in such an involved series. 

The third novel was published a year later, but in hardcover. Given how deeply I was into mass market paperbacks at the time, I waited an additional year for the fifth and sixth paperbacks. After the long interval, I had trouble remembering the characters, and all that had happened to them in the previous books. So I set the fifth and sixth paperbacks aside, vowing to read the entire series through from the beginning again. When I was ready.

Eventually, I did return to those novels. As best I recall, the process took me around six to eight months, and I completed the series in 2010. All together, this is one long, involved storyline, with weighty themes. Diehard Hamilton fans may regard it as unconscionable that I waited so long to start again, and took so long to finish the books. But while novels give, they also take. Those books brought me great joy, but they also took their toll on me. And in the meantime, while I was waiting to reread the saga, and then doing so, I was missing out on other great stories that Hamilton was creating. 

In 2013, I had the honor of meeting Peter F. Hamilton, and telling him how much I loved The Night's Dawn Trilogy. I also attended a reading he gave. In the years that have followed, I've gone on to read two more of his novels: The Dreaming Void and Mindstar Rising, as well as the short story collection Manhattan In Reverse. Ironically, while I usually prefer novels to short story collections, I enjoyed Manhattan In Reverse the most of the three.

Recently, I've started his novel The Abyss Beyond Dreams. While set in the same universe as The Dreaming Void, it's the first of a two book series called The Chronicle of the Fallers. It concerns life on a planet where much of the technology the settlers brought with them does not function. The growth of civilization is also limited by The Fallers, which are large eggs that fall through the atmosphere. They send out a hypnotic call that lures people to them, and once a person touches the egg, it absorbs the person, and then births a replica bent on killing anyone nearby. 

I find some of the technology the characters possess, and the abilities they wield, a little hard to believe in. Distanced as I am from these people, and how they interact, I find myself more removed from them than the characters in The Night's Dawn Trilogy. Yet as I read, I feel some of the same wonder I felt as I read those first mass market paperbacks in the 1990s. Also I get a little thrill remembering that when I met Peter F. Hamilton back in 2013, this was the upcoming novel he read an excerpt from. 

For those reasons, and perhaps even more importantly because of the way he treated me when we met, is why I'll keep reading Peter F. Hamilton, even if I don't read his novels in order, or in a timely manner.

Dragon Dave