The Reality Dysfunction [Hardcover]

Marion Zimmer Bradley says (Why Stories Get Rejected) that one of the fatal errors of science fiction is resorting to some outside power to resolve the story rather than having the main character(s) do it on their own. This series has outside forces to spare. One is introduced in the first installment, but seems to be put in hibernation. But in each subsequent book more and more unexplainable outside forces, omipotent, all-intelligent, supra-normal, beings or forces come on the scene. And the end. . .well, let's just say the main characters DO NOT resolve the issues by themselves.

Another thing about this series that got my goat was the disappearance of primary characters at the drop of a word processor. The first two books and the middle two books (The Neutronium Alchemist) introduce a plot and characters that simply disappear on a single page toward the end of the fourth installment (oh, one of them comes back as a crew-member, but of no signifigance). This disregard for plot line and point-of-view really drove me crazy. I kept expecting them to come back right up to the end. For example, the main character has a brother suddenly show up and present a nice plot twist. Is the twist resolved? No, the brother just disappears into the background (as another crew member).

I realize that long, long, long series are all the rage in SF these days, but the last couple of books in this series don't make any sense. I was not only disappointed, I was down right ticked off that I'd been tricked into spending my money but worse, my time. I finished this series in Australia but hauled the final book back with me so that I could rail about it.

I probably should give this one or two stars, but in all fairness, the first two books, and maybe the third, were pretty good. Especially the action descriptions. But, if you are looking for this entire series to be of that quality, you will be very upset.

I cannot fathom why the book is so long. I seems to me that it could have been shortened by at least 50% with absolutely no loss of content or style. But this is consistent with what appears to be an overall complete lack of editorial input throughout all the volumes. There are tons of grammatical errors and typos that could have been fixed by a decent editor but weren't. But these aside Hamilton is still only a mediocre writer who lacks the ability possessed in spades by colleagues like Bear, Brin and Benford.

The main plot idea is great - souls of dead people returning from the "beyond" to "possess" living humans. The universe that Hamilton constructs, with nanobiotech playing a central role is also fascinating.

However, although sounding like a hard sf novel, there is actually very little in the way of mechanistic explanations for any of the really cool stuff like "affinity bonding", a form of telepathy, or the "neural nanonic" implants that lots of folks have. Instead we are supposed to basically take all these things and more on faith.

The last 100 pages of the last book wrap things up in a nice neat little package, but in a way that is ultimately not very satisfying.

All in all, a valiant effort but one that the author couldn't quite pull off.