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Title: Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton ISBN: 0-446-52708-4 Publisher: Aspect Pub. Date: 11 March, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.83 (41 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: I Couldn't Put This Book Down
Comment: I just about used up all my free time reading this book. I even sacrificed some sleeping time for it. The story is just so interesting. Lawrence Newton's quest for happiness was especially spell binding. Powerful issues in love, socioeconomics, idealogies, class, etc. swirl around this magnificent military sci-fi. As always, the worlds Hamilton's characters inhabit are rich and well-developed. Hamilton understands the social, political, technological, and economic realities of life. I have to applaud Hamilton for having no clear villains and heroes in this book. The warring sides simply have different goals and prefer different means in achieving what they want. All are convinced of the righteousness of their cause and think the others are crazy/misguided/brainwashed (Lawrence Newton, Denise Ebourn, Simon Roderick). I have read his Greg Mandel books and the Reality Disfunction Series. I eagerly await his next novels.
Rating: 4
Summary: Identifying Goals and Means
Comment: If you assume we can have interstellar colonies, how do you keep mankind from simply creating its old problems on new worlds? In a world of nanotech, artificial sentience and customized genese, what's really important?
Hamilton doesn't dodge the Big Questions in "Fallen Dragon." The book intertwines four stories: Lawrence Newton as adult, a pirate for a multi-national, interstellar corporation that engages in colonial piracy at an interstellar scale; the same Lawrence Newton as a youth, a child of the ruling class in one of those colonies, obsessed with interstellar exploration; Denise, a colonist on another planet, who tells children the most amazing stories and may or may not be more than she seems; and Simon Roderick, a director of the the corporate pirates that employ Newton. Each has a different view of his or her universe, each has a different set of goals and each has a different set of means to those goals. Who's right and what's right are the heart of this story, as well as what's a legitimate way to pursue those goals.
Hamilton's concept of multi-national corporations whose shareholder return is based on a eumphemistic "asset realization" - simple piracy - of interstellar colonies is plausible, and has precedent in the British East india Company. The development choices made by the colonists on each of the colonies Newton visits to loot are imaginative; the colony of Santo Christo is especially interesting. "Skin" is the next obvious step after the armor in Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." And Hamilton does a nice job of tying the various plots together at the end, in a climax somewhat reminiscent of Iain M. Bank's "Use of Weapons."
On the other hand, the lengthy expository sections, as other reviewers have noted, do bog the story down somewhat, and could have used some editing. It's not clear to me what the purpose of the extended steamy sex scenes is, either.
Still and all, the story works, and works at several levels. Hamilton slyly hides a few cards until the last few pages, incuding the reason why Newton, apparently improbably, shifts sides near the end of the book, after hearing the story of Modrik. And I liked the ambiguity of the ending: you can't really be sure which solution is the "right solution," and perhaps there is neither a right solution nor a single right solution to the intractable problems that afflict mankind. Less palatable is Hamilton's implication that the only true virtue is selfishness.
But it's a good yarn, and well told. Recommended, with a caution that it may be dangerous to skim the tedious parts.
Rating: 4
Summary: Not great sci-fi, but definately good
Comment: As a frequent traveler, I find myself at the mercy of the stocking choices of airport booksellers when I have forgotten to bring sufficient reading material for my trip. This has resulted in my having intaken many, many awful science fiction books (Kevin J Anderson comes to mind as a guilty party). I didn't expect much else from Fallen Dragon, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a story of complexity and depth buried among the space opera. It's certainly not a landmark science-fiction novel, but the concepts are sound, the characters plausible, and there's enough neat ideas between the pages to create an entertaining universe. I liked this book.
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Title: Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton ISBN: 0345461622 Publisher: Del Rey Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: A Second Chance at Eden by Peter F. Hamilton ISBN: 0446606715 Publisher: Aspect Pub. Date: 01 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Naked God, Part 2: Faith by Peter F. Hamilton ISBN: 0446605182 Publisher: Aspect Pub. Date: 01 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Naked God Part 1 : Flight by Peter F. Hamilton ISBN: 0446608971 Publisher: Aspect Pub. Date: 01 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Golden Age by John C. Wright ISBN: 0812579844 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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