I like trash and Hamilton writes the best trash. so elaborate. the dead are coming back to possess the living except it's all science fictional! great world-building. I love world-building when the world being built gets destroyed. in this book, that's a bunch of worlds. plus some cool but corny but still cool sex scenes. Hamilton sure likes his sex scenes. I guess we have that in common.

4 Stars Reality Dysfunction by Peter Hamilton stole me from reality for quite some time. Coming in at over 1200 pages in length, this book is a massive endeavor. Fortunately for me Peter Hamilton writes hard science fiction and he specializes in his world building and imagination. Reality Dysfunction excels at both of these things. The best thing about this book was the world that he built within. The story and the characters are almost irrelevant and forgettable compared to the universe within....

Part of my 2020 Social Distancing Read-a-thonWell, that was a lot of reading for very little joy. This is the second book by this author that I've read and both of them in my opinion were way too long and had rather ridiculous plot elements. This novel had so many characters to keep track of and so many intertwining plot lines that I couldn't set the book down for very long or I would lose the thread.It's too bad because I thought there were tons of good ideas in the course of things. For exampl...

Wow, what to say about this book. It is NOT EASY READING, that's for sure. The first 1/4 almost is like running through a valley of quicksand, but I swear the momentum is worth it. I felt my interest waning sometimes because it is SO DENSE, but then, rather than stopping, I'd skim a bit forward over all the meticulous details of the worlds etc and get back on track with some of the characters. This book requires stamina but if you're into sci-fi is worth the effort. All the thought and imaginati...

Re-read because I own the two following installments in the series, but couldn't remember much about "The Reality Dysfunction" (apart from the fact that I enjoyed it heaps) as I read it back in 2000...maybe 2001.What we've got here is super-advanced technology featuring sentient starships able to give birth to other starships. The commanders of said starships grow inside/with them, and are sort of telepathically connected with them, and treat them like brothers, parents and, in general, family.....

A bit of investment required to finish this. The Reality Dysfunction is a monster of a book, boasting more than 1200 pages. It is also a somewhat distressing read. By the time the book hits one third there has been a multitude of uneasy things for the reader to digest. Rape; exploitation; satanic rituals; torture; murder and mutilation (where, in some cases, the victims are children); genocide; injuries inflicted to protagonists that will make the squeamish light-headed; demonic possession… to n...

Awesome. When I went through law school and then bar school I was forced to eject many vital tidbits of information that were taking up valuable space in my brain: my address, my year of birth, etc. I have no idea how Peter F. Hamilton holds all of this massive universe, its technology and characters in one noggin. He clearly does not remember his wife's birthday or his underwear size. We all have to make sacrifices.The Reality Dysfunction is fun. Lots of fun. I flew through this book and forgav...

Mix space battles, zombies, interplanetary smugglers, space pirates, living spaceships, mysterious highly advanced alien race vanished without a trace for no apparent reason, a very lucky guy with a dream, struggling colonists on a newly discovered planet, devil worshiper cults, sentient planets, mercenaries with some serious high-tech body modifications that would make any cyborg in science fiction die of envy, and a lost doomsday device. Basically anything you can think of probably with except...

Warning: this is NOT science fiction, it's Christian fantasy disguised as Radical Hard SF. It starts out as a fairly ripping space opera with some clever worldbuilding, but then somewhere around page 700, a Satanic ritual conjures forth the souls of the deceased from the Afterlife into our universe. YES I'M SERIOUS! One of the few books I've ever literally thrown across the room in disgust. I sold the book back to the used bookstore from whence I bought it, but in retrospect, I deeply regret not...

Great world building, action packed, stunning concepts and the most beautiful creature-ships ever imagined: the Voidhawks

I really wanted to like this novel a lot. I wanted to get invested from the sheer length of the novel and come out the other side, saying, "Wow, that was fantastic." Just because I'm not doesn't mean that the novel wasn't worthwhile, it just means that the negative qualities of it managed to outweigh what was good.Let's face it. A novel that is almost 1500 pages is either full of characters, full of story, or full of meandering and inconsequential shit that didn't really serve the final solid ta...

I'm on page 450 and I don't know if I can finish this one. So far we've had:Awesome:- Humans biologically bonded to technology: Because I can't wait for my own neural link into the internets.- Space colonisation programme, settlers, frontiers, etc. = I always enjoy this sort of thing.Not so awesome:The protagonist is a tremendous Gary Stu: not only do his adventures all turn out all right, he also ALWAYS gets the girl. He's handsome! In a roguish way! And as soon as he smiles at any female in th...

What an marathon this book was for me, it took me almost 40 days to finish this book. The Reality Dysfunction is not for a weak hearted, it is 1223 pages long and whooping 41 hours in audio.Hamilton goes to super detail describing anything in this book be it a species a planet or a star ship. And many times due to this attention to detail I lost regarding where we are as regards to story.Also as I mostly hear audio to and fro from work, I used to doze off and had to start entire chapter again.

*sigh*I wanted to like this. I did. And I liked parts of it a lot, many of the ideas were fascinating, several of the characters I really dug. But there were other issues that hampered my overall enjoyment, and they can't be ignored.Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

It took a hell of a long time, but I've made it through The Reality Dysfunction, the first volume in a trilogy recommended to me by Ennis. It's a "space opera" about a futuristic society plagued by an evil force that "sequestrates," or maybe just possesses, people.The story takes place in the Confederation in the 2600s. The set-up is quite detailed and interesting. One group, the Adamists, lives on a failing planet Earth and various other planets. The Adamists are mostly like the people of today...

Ah, the Night’s Dawn Trilogy. One of the most amazing, wild space opera’s ever written. In the UK it is 3 massive books, while here in the US they nickel-and-dimed us by splitting them up into 6. It doesn’t really matter though, because it is not so much a trilogy as it is one gigantic continuous story, regardless of where they are split. One book ends at whatever chapter, and the following book simply begins at the next. Peter Hamilton is probably my favorite SF writer when it comes to world bu...

This is one of the best Sci-Fi series ever written, comparable with the old classics and The Expanse, Reynolds, Banks, Scalzi, Stephenson, Simmons,… and I can´t say how much I love this novel. I was still really young when I read it the first time and Hamilton was the one who opened my mind for the immense possibilities of Sci-Fi. And the endless love story began,... I should consider rereading all he wrote again. He is the Stephen King of Sci-Fi, other genre authors might write less stereotypic...

This is the worst-written book I've ever read twice. Hamilton is not just a bad writer but a bad writer in a hurry--superabundantly verbose, careless about style and tone, overdescriptive, flaccidly repetitive, malapropistic when he isn't spouting tired old cliches. He's a lousy scene-painter, too, careless about details and how they fit together and given to commencing every descriptive paragraph with the physical dimensions of whatever is being described--twenty kilometers long and weighing ni...

"TL,DR. There are very few SF stories that justify more than 120,000 words."- Jo Walton's blog on Hugo Nominees: 1998 Jo Walton is the best sf books reviewer extant (IMO), as an author she is no slouch either. Unfortunately for her The Reality Dysfunction is the exception that proves the rule, this is one of the "very few SF stories" that she is talking about. Certainly a book this magnitude, clocking on at over 1,200 pages, is dissuasive for many people. If you are interested in reading this

Good news for white cishet dudes who are into segregation and racial purity. Also in the future, most of you will be issued harems. There are some neat ideas in here, and I love the affinity-bonded relationships with bitek (biotech) ships and habitats. I'm curious about what ended the decimated alien civilization that left the ruins, too, but not enough to hack my way through this. Notes / highlights follow my progression from mild consternation about the race and gender stuff ...through sexual