I can recall the first time I saw this book as clearly as if it happened a month ago; a surprising feat considering how shoddy my memory can be. I was sitting on the wooden floorboards of my dad's study, sunlight pouring through the louvres in equal measure with the (relatively) cool air of a tropical dry season, when I saw a chunky book sitting on the bottom of a pretty crowded bookshelf. Wedged in between a copy of The Lord of the Rings and Stephen Donaldson's This Day All Gods Die (a fucking impenetrable read, I'll say), was a copy of Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction --the first of a trilogy of books which have stayed in my mind for over a decade now.
The spine was creased to hell and back, suggesting it was a "well-loved" book, and the cover was slightly discoloured with age and suffered from more than a little wear and tear. I was anywhere from thirteen to fourteen years old at the time and just entering middle school, and, like my dad, I was a voracious reader of science fiction. By then I had read my dad's two favourites, Asimov and Clarke, and was on the lookout for something more modern and substantial than the short stories and novels the two men had written. Now, I was a little too young to read the Reality Dysfunction by myself and truly grasp a lot of its themes and plot elements, but even at that young age, the books managed to indelibly mark the way I write.
Oh, and my dad's still alive, by the way. I know I've written this like he's passed on and I'm going over my memories of him with a fine-toothed comb, but he's fine. He had knee surgery a couple of days ago and there's a whole-ass pandemic going on, but he's solidly alive.
Anyway, let's get started before I remember that I've never done this before and don't know what I'm doing!
First published in England in 1996, The Reality Dysfunction is primarily set in the years 2610 and 2611 in a loosely-bound confederation of systems called… The Confederation. Having launched his career on a trilogy of standalone novels (are you sensing a pattern here?) about a psychic ex-soldier turned private detective in a world suffering from extensive climate change and world-straddling megacorporations, Hamilton elected to expand the scope of his next story to encompass a decent section of the galaxy and beyond. Interestingly, Hamilton seems to have come up with the universe almost on accident, having published several short stories in the years prior which featured bits and pieces of what would eventually become the universe of the Night's Dawn Trilogy and which, upon the series success, were explicitly reset in the collection A Second Chance At Eden.
Now, while it would be understandable for you all to assume I'm some kind of fanboy on a mission to proselytize, as I've grown older, I've become better able to interrogate the decisions Hamilton made while writing these books. Though my respect for them hasn't diminished, my feelings have grown much more complex and nuanced than they were when I first read the series. I've seen the books described as the Anti-Culture, and while I feel like that's going too far, I can see where they're coming from. The reasons for this will become apparent as we dig into the book, but I want you all to know this straight away.
So… this is the cover. Well, technically it's a cover.
See, the Reality Dysfunction comes in at a whopping 1120 pages and 350,000+ words, and was split into multiple volumes for release in certain countries. For Germany and the US, it was turned into two books, for France, it was three, and for Italy and Portugal, it was turned into four separate releases. Luckily, my dad bought the Absolute Unit that was the single paperback edition featuring the fantastic art of Jim Burns. Here it is in full with none of the annoying words part of the book splayed across it.
This is a scene from the novel which appears very late in the game and so I won't go into much detail about its relevance and meaning. Suffice to say, it's a little busy as artwork goes, but it contains some very important details and is reasonably accurate to the descriptions given compared to what you might typically see in the genre.
In the foreground is a bright blue, tadpole-shaped thing called a Voidhawk. Voidhawks are living starships made using advanced biotechnology called Bitek. Voidhawks are nice (this isn't a joke. They're cool). Behind and in front of the Voidhawk are two black spheres (one of which is busy exploding) and a weird windmill structure with glowy bits. The spheres are mechanical starships forced into that shape by the constraints of the Zero Temporal Transit drive --humanity's FTL system--, and the windmill is Burn's representation of the thermal dissipation systems used by mechanical starships to dump waste heat. To the right of the Voidhawk and looking like really weird aircraft, are what I believe to be Jim Burn's interpretation of Combat Wasps; fusion (or antimatter) powered-missiles containing a number of submunitions ranging from triple-digit megaton nuclear weapons to swarms of KKVs and bomb-pumped lasers.
Space outside the attack cruiser Beezling tore open in five places. For a moment anyone looking into the expanding rents would have received a true glimpse into empty infinity. The pseudofabric structure of the wormholes was a photonic dead zone, a darkness so profound it seemed to be spilling out to contaminate the real universe. Then ships were suddenly streaking up out of the gaping termini, accelerating away at six gees, twisting round on interception trajectories. They were different from the spherical Garissan naval craft which they had tracked between the stars, graceful, streamlined teardrop shapes. Larger and dangerously powerful. Alive.
I really like this introduction to the universe of the Night's Dawn Trilogy. In just one-hundred-and-one words, it grabs the attention of the reader, it demarcates two sides, it lets us imagine what it looks like when a ship jumps to a location in space, it describes the differences between the two sides, and it gives the new starships a palpable sense of menace by making use of clipped sentences and some pretty descriptive words. It's not overly descriptive and staid as some introductions can be, rather it gives readers a sense of momentum which continues the whole way through the chapter.
Nestled snugly in the armoured and sealed command capsule at the heart of the Beezling, Captain Kyle Prager was shocked out of a simple astrogration review by a datavised proximity alert from the flight computer. His neural nanonics relayed information from the ship's external sensor clusters directly into his brain. Out here in the great emptiness of interstellar space starlight wasn't powerful enough to provide an optical-band return. He was relying on the infrared signature alone, arching smears of pinkness which the discrimination programs struggled to resolve. Radar pulses were fuzzed and hashed by the ships' electronic-warfare pods.
The combat programs stored in the memory clusters of his neural nanonics went into primary mode. He datavised a quick sequence of instructions into the flight computer, desperate for more information. Trajectories from the five newcomers were computed, appearing as scarlet vector lines curving through space to line up ominously on the Beezling and her two escort frigates. They were still accelerating, yet there was no reaction-drive exhaust plume. Kyle Prager's heart sank. "Voidhawks," he said.
There are things in the Confederation called neural nanonics and they stream information directly into your brain. Given the context, we also learn that the word datavise and its derivatives means to send information to and from neural nanonics --essentially, technological wifi. Already we're being set up to understand that the future is different from our own in small and not-so-small ways as a result of trends that started before we were born. Compare and contrast to something like David Weber's Honor Harrington series where people are generally just people who live lives very similar to our own in ways very similar to our own. Granted Hamilton's view of the future is very conservative in its own right (I'll get to that later), but it's still nice to see that the future isn't just The 1990s With Spaceships And A Few Other Greebles.
Speaking of spaceships, we learn that another major difference between the Garissan spaceships and the interlopers is that the interlopers don't have to give a shit about reaction mass --kind of a big deal when doing orbital mechanics--, and that said lack of exhaust renders them instantly identifiable.
Later on in the chapter, we learn that Garissa was colonized by Africans, and we can pretty safely assume that Omuta is named after the city of Omuta in Japan, thus implying that it was colonized by the Japanese. We also learn that antimatter, that old sci-fi staple, is treated even more harshly by the Confederation than nerve gas or nuclear weapons are in the real world, to the point where a ship carrying any is grounds for the captain's execution and the crew's exile. Furthermore, given the way things are worded, it's made pretty clear that while the Garissans and Omutans are in some kind of a conflict, the Confederation sits above it, that the Confederation uses Voidhawks (and is probably the most associated with them in a military capacity), that the Confederation is trying to prevent retaliation to some unspecified attack, and that it's empowered to merk the captains of sovereign naval vessels in certain circumstances. Presumably, the Confederation Navy has the right to inspect ships they suspect of carrying antimatter as those proscriptions against antimatter would be unenforceable otherwise.
Can you even imagine a world in which the UN has a navy and could execute any captain whose ship carried Plutonium? Given that no nation would accept that state of affairs if they could say no to it, it implies that they can't tell them to fuck off.
Also, to those of you asking why the Garissan's don't leg it?
"A distortion field has locked onto us," Tane Ogilie reported. His voice was strained, high. "We can't jump clear."
Voidhawks can stop FTL jumps via an as-yet-unexplained mechanism.
We also see that Captain Prager is, ultimately, a decent guy. Though he considers waiting until the Voidhawks rendezvous to shut off the magnetic containment fields keeping the antimatter secure, he decides not to as their crews are merely doing their job. While some might decry it as not Hard Man enough, it makes sense given that he's been beaten without a shot being fired and he knows it. However, the Beezling is carrying something called the Alchemist, and Prager can't allow it to fall into the hands of the Edenists (presumably, a group important in the Confederation) and so prepares to detonate the antimatter.
Fortunately(?) he turns out to be wrong about who the ships belong to.
The flimsy infrared image of the three pursuit craft suddenly increased dramatically, brightening, expanding. Eight wavering petals of energy opened outwards from each of them, the sharp, glaring tips moving swiftly away from the centre. Analysis programs cut in; flight vector projections materialized, linking all twenty-four projectiles to the Beezling with looped laserlike threads of light. The exhaust plumes were hugely radioactive. Acceleration was hitting forty gees. Antimatter propulsion.
"Combat wasp launch," Tane Ogilie shouted hoarsely.
"They're not voidhawks," Kyle Prager said with grim fury. "They're fucking blackhawks. Omuta's hired blackhawks!"
Given the similar name and the way an experienced naval captain misidentified them, blackhawks and voidhawks clearly share a lot of similarities. However, the fact that he mentions Omuta hiring the blackhawks tells us that blackhawks are available for mercenary work --implying a whole ecosystem which exists in the background of the universe. Additionally, we also get our first look at what combat looks like in the Night's Dawn Trilogy: fast-moving missiles.
To avoid the missiles, the Beezling accelerates up to eight gees and starts manoeuvring; a pretty impressive speed for something that has to obey the laws of physics. To counteract the G-forces, Prager and the rest of his crew have some kind of internal nanotech reinforcement which prevents damage to their body while they're lying on their couches and which maintains the flow of blood to their brains. Since neural nanonics exist and allow them to communicate with the ship's computers via thought, spaceship crews probably don't need to use their hands to do anything when it comes to flying.
We also learn that the Beezling is carrying a bunch of civilians and that one of them, a Dr Alkad Mzu, built the Alchemist.
One slight rewind of the clock later, and…
Alkad knew it took superb astrogation for ships to emerge within five thousand kilometres of each other after a jump of ten light-years. Garissa had spent a lot of money on equipping its navy with the best hardware available.
Money which could have been better spent at the university, or on supporting the national medical service. Garissa wasn't a particularly rich world. And as to where the Department of Defence had acquired such large amounts of antimatter, Alkad had studiously avoided asking.
From just three sentences we get a solid handle on what Dr Mzu is like. In short: she's a grumpy doctor who doesn't like the funding priorities of Garissa and is smart enough to keep her head down in the current climate. She also happens to be one of those characters Hamilton sets up a long time before the events she's central to occur. Get used to that in this trilogy, it happens a lot.
A little later in the chapter, we learn that she's a genius mathematician and, while not single-handedly responsible for the creation of the Alchemist, was a central figure in its development. She's religious to some degree given the way she frames her role in the creation of the Alchemist (I.E she'll be forever damned), and she's engaged to a man named Peter Abdul who is described as being unperturbed by her role in its creation and who is sharing an acceleration couch with her. Given the name, we can assume that the Alchemist converts X into Y, but what X and Y are is up in the air.
Before we can get any answers, however, we catch up to events on the bridge and the shit hits the fan. Unprepared, Mzu and Abdul are surprised by the acceleration warning that rings out a split second before the Beezling starts moving at eight gees; Abdul rolling off of Mzu's acceleration couch and his fiance getting 90% of her body onto the couch.
The POV then cuts to a third person omniscient view of the battle.
The two opposing swarms of combat wasps engaged; attacking and defending drones splitting open, each releasing a barrage of submunitions. Space seethed with directed energy beams. Electronic warfare pulses popped and burned up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, trying to deflect, goad, confuse, harass. A second later it was the turn of the missiles. Solid kinetic bullets bloomed like antique shotgun blasts. All it took was the slightest graze, at those closing velocities both projectile and target alike detonated into billowing plumes of plasma. Fusion explosions followed, intense flares of blue-white starfire flinging off violet coronae. Antimatter added its vehemence to the fray, producing even larger explosions amid the ionic maelstrom.
The nebula which blazed between the Beezling and her attackers was roughly lenticular, and over three hundred kilometres broad, choked with dense cyclonic concentrations, spewing tremendous cataracts of fire from its edges. No sensor in existence could penetrate such chaos.
Beezling lurched round violently, drive deflector coils working at maximum pitch, taking advantage of the momentary blind spot to change course. A second volley of combat wasps shot out of their bays around the attack cruiser's lower hull, just in time to meet a new salvo fired from the blackhawks.
It's p. cool. It's detailed enough that you can picture what's going on in your head, but not so detailed that the momentum of the scene suffers. For all his flaws, and Hamilton has a few, the man can write a space combat scene.
We're then treated to both characters suffering immensely as the Beezling reaches maximum acceleration. Abdul, lying on a hard composite floor, is thrown around by the constantly shifting acceleration while Mzu's knee is slowly wrenched apart by the weight of her leg.
Y I K E
Six thousand kilometres away, another nuclear-fuelled nebula burst into existence as the Chengho fought off its solitary hunter's swarm of combat wasps. The Gombari wasn't so fortunate. Its antimatter-confinement chambers were shattered by the incoming weapons. Beezling's sensor filters engaged instantly as an ephemeral star ignited. Kyle Prager lost his datavised visualization across half of the universe. He never saw the blackhawk which attacked the frigate wrenching open a wormhole interstice and vanish within, fleeing the lethal sleet of radiation its attack had liberated.
The Garissan escorts being named the Chengho and the Gombari is, I think, an unfortunate artifact of Hamilton treating Africa as one big country rather than an entire continent full of nations and different ethnic groups. It actually runs somewhat counter to a universe detail he mentions later on in the book and I suspect is the result of him being cis white dude from England born in the 1960s and writing in the 1990s. I'll get into detail about it later, but I have a whole rant stored up because, well, bruh. B R U H.
Regardless, we also learn that blackhawks, and presumably voidhawks, are kind of OP in that they can just fuck off really quickly provided they aren't being affected by a distortion field. Also, for those of you who liked to joke about how we should get the point of view of the missiles in the Honor Harrington series, you're in luck!
By this, I, of course, mean that we get the POV of a missile coming in to kill the Beezling.
At ninety-five kilometres away the magnetic field of the first confinement chamber snapped off. Forty-six gravities took over. The frozen pellet of antimatter was smashed into the rear wall. Long before contact was actually made the magnetic field of the second confinement chamber was switched off. All seven shut down over a period of a hundred picoseconds, producing a specifically shaped blast wave.
At eighty-eight kilometres away, the antimatter pellets had annihilated an equal mass of matter, resulting in a titanic energy release. The spear of plasma which formed was a thousand times hotter than the core of a star, hurtling towards the Beezling at relativistic velocities.
Sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels vaporized immediately as the stream of disassociated ions slammed into the Beezling. Molecular-binding force generators laboured to maintain the silicon hull's integrity, a struggle they were always destined to lose against such ferocity. Breakthrough occurred in a dozen different places at once. Plasma surged in, playing over the complex, delicate systems like a blowtorch over snow crystals.
For real though, the Beezling is mission-killed lightyears away from a friendly port. The blackhawks, in true mercenary fashion, leave the moment they determine this: presumably because missiles are expensive and they don't want to burn any more money than they have to.
We then cut back to Mzu rising to consciousness, the woman despairing at the thought that they'd been intercepted lightyears from their target.
We find out that Omuta and Garissa are at war thanks to a bunch of metal-rich asteroids simultaneously discovered by the two governments in a nearby solar system. The asteroids, dubbed Dorados, represent a wealth of easily mined… wealth and so, naturally, both sides want them for themselves and are unwilling to back down. After a series of increasingly dire escalations, both sides find themselves on the precipice where one wrong move could doom millions or even billions of people. In fact, it was the Omutan bombing of a Garissan asteroid settlement with antimatter weapons that finally drove Dr Mzu to develop the Alchemist. So, you know, talk about sowing the seeds of your own destruction.
Speaking of which, we finally get a clearer idea of what it is the Alchemist is intended to do via a flashback (plus we learn that Earth is a one-world-government and that it deports a million people a week).
He sighed, studying her face. "It's their star we're aiming for, Alkad, not Omuta itself. They'll have a chance. A good chance."
"There are seventy-five million people on that planet. There will be no light, no warmth."
"The Confederation will help. Hell, when the Great Dispersal was at its peak, Earth was deporting over ten million people a week."
"Those old colony-transport ships have gone now."
"Earth's Govcentral is still kicking out a good million a week even now; and there are thousands of military transports. It can be done."
I'll admit to thinking that Hamilton doesn't quite sell people's voices or their environments when they're talking. It's less of an issue here given the limited amounts of dialogue and their setting, but I've found that he sometimes does a white room kind of thing where two characters may as well be speaking in a featureless white room for all the impact their environment has on them. Plus, he doesn't add many quirks to the way his characters speak. I imagine it's a function of him just having loads of characters, but it does mean you can lose track pretty easily, IMO.
After the above flashback concludes, however, Doctor Mzu returns to the land of the living to find that things are completely fucked.
The sunlight pouring through the mess window deepened to a sickly red and started to fade. Alkad wondered woozily if the Alchemist was already at work on it. But then the stimulant programs steadied her thoughts, and she realized she was in free fall, her cabin illuminated by a weak pink-tinged emergency light. People were floating around her. Beezling's crew, murmuring in quiet worried tones. Something warm and damp brushed against her cheek, sticking. She brought her hand up instinctively. A swarm of dark motes swam across her field of view, glistening in the light. Blood!
After a moment of panic, we find that Peter is still alive, albeit badly injured thanks to being thrown around, and Mzu is given the bad news that the Beezling is dead in the water. While Hamilton does infodump about the ZTT drive later on, here we're only told that mechanical starships rely on things called jump nodes to, well, jump to multiple lightyears at a go and that 30% of the Beezling's nodes were damaged by the combat wasp strike. As a naval ship, the Beezling could jump with as much as 10% of the nodes down, but 30% is too much and so they're stuck 7 light-years from the nearest inhabited system.
Now, at this point in the story, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the reason why the Confederation bans antimatter is due to its effectiveness in combat wasps and the ease at which someone armed with antimatter can wreck asteroid settlements. The previously mentioned Omutan bombing killed more than 50,000 people and injured a further 18,000 in an attack that pushed Garissa's healthcare system to its limit, and antimatter-powered combat wasps had nearly double the acceleration of their conventional competitors. Therefore, it'd be quite reasonable to assume that antimatter is banned is that it's too effective, it equalizes things too well between the Confederation Navy and the navies of individual systems. Given what we know, a minor power whose navy is armed with antimatter could kill asteroid settlements really easily and any attempt at dealing with them would be incredibly costly for conventional forces.
However, the truth is a little more horrifying.
At that moment they were precisely thirty-six and a half light-years from their G3 home star, Garissa. If they had trained the Beezling's remaining optical sensors on the faint diamond of light far behind, and if those sensors possessed sufficient resolution, then in thirty-six years, six months, and two days they would have seen a brief surge in the apparent magnitude as Omuta's mercenary ships dropped fifteen antimatter planet-buster bombs on their home world. Each one had a megatonnage blast equivalent to the asteroid impact which wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth. Garissa's atmosphere was ruined beyond redemption. Superstorms arose which would rage for millennia to come. By themselves, they weren't fatal. On Earth, the shielded arcologies had sheltered people from their heat-wrecked climate for five and a half centuries. But unlike an asteroid impact, where the energy release was purely thermal, the planet-busters each emitted the same amount of radiation as a small solar flare. Within eight hours, the rampaging storms had spread the nuclear fallout right across the planet, rendering it completely uninhabitable. Total sterilization took a further two months.
Two days after the Beezling is intercepted in its attempt to shut off the Omutan's sun, Blackhawks in the employ of the Omutan government commit genocide. According to Hamilton, planet-busters release as much as 100 teratons of energy in a single blast and the Omutans dropped 15 of them on Garissa --overkill in the grossest sense of the word. I actually did the math on how much antimatter you'd need per planet-buster and I came to a figure of about 4,655.33 tons, meaning that Omuta dropped nearly 70,000 tons of antimatter rather than peacefully resolve a dispute over mining rights. No fucking wonder why the Confederation treats it so seriously.
As an aside, I think The Reality Dysfunction may have possibly influenced Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri as it came out three years before SMAC was released. While there's no real evidence either way (planet-buster is a generic enough term I'm not going to stake anything on its shared use), I think it's a distinct possibility given the fact that the universe of The Night's Dawn is reasonably hard science fiction outside of its One Big Thing. I suppose I could always ask Brian Reynolds via twitter, but I'm lazy.
So… yeah. This chapter is all set up. In fact, so are the next four. I'll get through them quicker next time, I promise.
It's been a while since I read those books, so it'll be interesting to take another look. I have to say, though, that I vastly prefer the Commonwealth universe over the Confederation one.
It's been a while since I read those books, so it'll be interesting to take another look. I have to say, though, that I vastly prefer the Commonwealth universe over the Confederation one.
There's actually not a whole lot to say about this chapter. It's not that it's bad or even unnecessary, the problem is just that it's set up for setup and so isn't really something we have to discuss in any depth. Its inclusion in the book is required for Hamilton as he needs a way of justifying something that occurs later on in the story, but it exists in an awkward narrative location and could have been excised entirely with minor changes to the overall story.
Essentially, this chapter is a description of a tidally-locked moon orbiting a gas giant a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away and the evolutionary history of the species which calls it home. This moon, which is ravaged by cyclones and radiation once every nine years thanks to the periodic conjunction of four moons, is inhabited by a species of alien called the Ly-Cilph. These aliens are similar to jellyfish in some ways and have both a very different outlook on existence than humans do and a similarly alien life cycle.
The Ly-cilph begin life as non-sapient, slug-like fish which feed on the rotting sludge of their planet's vegetation for their first three years of their lives. During this time, they lose their tails and turn into predatory, tentacle-equipped slugs about a meter tall before finally leaving the water for land. Upon landfall, they proceed to root around the floor of the planetwide jungles for a particular kind of node deposited by their forebears --black, truffle-like bundles of cells which contain the accumulated memory of their species in chemical form. After consuming these nodules, the Li-cilph finally become sapient and the telepathic part of their brain activates.
The knowledge is mainly of a philosophical nature, although mathematics is highly developed; what they know is what they have observed and speculated upon, and added to with each generation. Farside night acts as a magnet as they gather to observe the stars. Eyes and minds linked by telepathy, acting as a gigantic multi-segment telescope. There is no technology, no economy. Their culture is not orientated towards the mechanical or materialistic; their knowledge is their wealth. The data-processing capacity of their linked minds far exceeds that of any electronic computer system, and their perception is not limited to the meagre electromagnetic wavelengths of the optical bands.
Once awoken, they learn. It is their purpose. They have so little time in their corporeal form, and the universe they find themselves in, the splendour of the gas supergiant and its multifarious satellites, is large. Nature has ordained them as gatherers of knowledge. If life has a purpose, they speculate, then it must be a journey to complete understanding.
I quite like these guys. They're interesting, philosophically speaking, and their life cycle is unusual without seeming terribly unnatural in comparison to that of aliens in other stories. However, as I mentioned before, they don't need to exist for 99.999% of the narrative to occur. They could be replaced easily enough with a [REDACTED], a [REDACTED], or even a [DATA EXPUNGED] and the plot would continue on smoothly.
Unfortunately, these guys are on a bit of a time limit when it comes to life. Their juvenile stage takes up a good third of the nine years they have to live, and they aren't even intelligent during it. After nine years of existence, the Ly-cilph's planet aligns with three others above the gas giant and the flux tube connecting the gas giant to its Io-analogue reaches out...
The deluge arrives at the end of the planet's one and only mating season. The Ly-cilph and their non-sentient cousins have produced their eggs and secreted them into the lakebeds. Plants have flowered and scattered their seeds across the landscape. Now there is only the prospect of death.
When the first titanic bursts of azure lightning break overhead, the Ly-cilph stop their analysing and deliberations, and begin to impart all they know into the empty cells of the nodes which have grown out of their skin like warts around the base of their tentacles.
The winds howl, voicing the planet's torment. Gusts are strong enough to break the metre-thick stems of the fern trees. Once one goes it starts a domino effect in the jungle. Destruction spreads out in vast ripples, looking like bomb blasts from above. Clouds are torn apart by the violence, reduced to cotton tufts spinning frantically in the grip of small, ferocious whirlwinds. Micro-typhoons plunge back and forth, accelerating the obliteration of the jungle.
Lacking anything like an industrial base and so unable to flee their planet conventionally, these beauties have evolved an interesting escape route over millions of years...
The particle jet has reached its zenith. The flux tube's rain of energy penetrates the tormented lower atmosphere. It is embraced by the Ly-cilph. Their minds consume the power, using it to metamorphose once again. The nodes brought them sentience, the supergiant's surplus energy brings them transcendence. They leave the chrysalis of the flesh behind, shooting up the stream of particles at lightspeed, spacefree and eternal.
Psychic Alien Jellyfish Ghosts capable of flying through space.
Despite transforming into Psychic Alien Jellyfish Ghosts capable of flying through space, the Ly-cilph's outlook on life (death?) hasn't changed. They're still committed to observing and learning and, after a few days spent growing bolder and bolder, leave their old homeworld to explore the wider universe. As a species which undergoes multiple transformations throughout their lives from egg to fish to slug to walking jellyfish to intelligent walking jellyfish to ghost jellyfish, the Ly-cilph understandably look to the future with the expectation/hope that the end of the universe will prefigure a new transformation and the switch to another type of existence.
Somewhat ominously, however, chapter two ends with this.
But until then they are content to observe and learn. Their very nature precludes them from taking part in the myriad dramas of life and matter unfolding before their ethereal senses.
In a way, that last line is everything about this chapter that I don't like. It's not that it's terrible or even particularly harmful to the pacing/themes/whatever, it's just that it doesn't need to be there for the story to work. That's actually something of a common theme I find with Hamilton. He's a good writer, but he includes some stuff that just doesn't need to be present and doing so adds a degree of bloat to his works. This is most obvious in recent years as he seems to have gained a degree of protection from editors as a result of him being one of Britain's more popular science fiction authors, but it's visible even now. In my opinion, such bloat is nowhere near on par with people like Weber (yet) but it's one of those things you have to watch.
For real, though, chapter three details the pseudo-conception and early life of a relatively important character named Syrinx and her companion/sibling/starship, Oenone. It also serves to inform readers about what voidhawks are after they were introduced to the concept in chapter one, as well as several other important concepts such as Edenism, Adamism, Affinity, Bitek, and Habitats. This chapter is basically an introduction to Edenism that lightly touches on the major parts of the society. I promise I'll do a side-entry about both Edenism and Adamism at some point, as well as my thoughts on both.
Unlike chapter two, I'll be quoting a fair amount of this chapter as it's… a lot. Not only does it give readers a fairly solid understanding of several important things, but by giving us a look at Syrinx's childhood, it lets us see how she differs from other Edenists and why.
So, let's talk about Iasius and why it came back to Saturn to die.
Iasius is a voidhawk, an intelligent, self-aware starship made using Bitek. Voidhawks like Iasius (and blackhawks, their cousins) fly by surfing a wave of distorted space; a distortion field which allows them to move in any direction without expending reaction mass. Unlike Adamist (read: mechanical) starships, voidhawks can accelerate in any direction they wish instead of merely along their thrust-vector, and can manipulate the distortion field to negate some of the acceleration felt by those onboard. As you might imagine, flying in a voidhawk is infinitely more pleasant than flying in a mechanical starship as you don't experience zero-gravity or high-gravity outside of combat situations.
The distortion field can also be used to shut down the ability of mechanical starships to jump away and to sense objects by their mass in something like a million-kilometre wide zone, making voidhawks indispensable to the Confederation Navy. A different application of the same mechanism can be used to jump as much as 15 light-years, and a particularly skilled voidhawk is capable of chaining multiple jumps to get even further. Said FTL ability is much more refined than that of mechanical starships, and so the Bitek starships can just jump straight from one planet into the orbit of another while mechanical starships need to spend time and fuel changing their heading and velocity to ensure that they're in orbit once they arrive.
The reason I bring this up is that, for all of Bitek's power, it's incapable of replacing the cells that generate the distortion field faster than they degrade.
Iasius came back to Saturn because it is dying of old age and wishes to give birth before it goes.
I can't help it, her mind cried back. It's so unfair. We should go together, we should be allowed.
There was an eldritch caress down her spine, more tender than any human lover could ever bestow. She had felt that same touch on every day of all her hundred and eight years. Her only true love. None of her three husbands received as much emotional devotion as Iasius, nor, she admitted with something approaching sacrilege, had her eight children, and three of them she had carried in her own womb. But other Edenists understood and sympathized; with their communal affinity there was no hiding emotions or truth. The birthbond between the voidhawks and their captains was strong enough to survive anything the universe could possibly throw at them.
I actually do quite like this scene as you get a solid idea of the strength of the bond between Iasius and its captain, Athene, without knowing yet why it's so strong. Like, sure you see people building attachments to their spaceships in fiction all the time, but when was the last time such a bond was said to be stronger than that between lovers or family? It's unique, in my experience, and it primes readers to understand that voidhawks and Edenism in general are different.
Speaking of Edenism, the bolded text is in the book proper and is used to represent messages sent via Affinity. I mentioned in chapter one that datavising is, essentially, machine telepathy and is done by neural implants, well Affinity is actual telepathy. The mechanism for how it works is largely unexplained and vague, but it basically lets people talk to one another privately or publicly and lets them share their emotions, and it does it all without involving radio waves or, I think, the light-speed limit. It's the foundation upon which Edenism is built as it's said to reduce conflict and it allows them to run a form of direct democracy and consensus-based decision making. Furthermore, it's also foundational to the split between Edenism and the rest of humanity (known as Adamists) as its development and sequencing into the human genome resulted in a backlash from religious and civil authorities that saw its use on pre-FTL Earth reduced to nothing.
There's more to it than that, of course, but that's two books away.
Anyway, how does Iasuis plan to give birth and die? Well, kind of at the same time.
See, when it comes time for a voidhawk to die, it returns to the gas giant it was born over and its captain inserts zygotes into the voidhawk's ten eggs. These eggs contain not only the voidhawk's children but also a womb for the zygote to grow in over the course of a year. These zygotes are the future captains of the voidhawks and a unique bond forms between them and their voidhawk thanks to Affinity and a shared pre-childhood. I imagine this is attempting to invoke the idea of twins having a unique bond due to shared experiences in the womb, and while I don't believe that exists myself, I can at least appreciate the parallel.
Is it the idea of such a unique bond a bit bullshit? Yeah. Is it an interesting ritual for a society 600 years in the future to practice? Also yeah. While I'm not entirely sure such a ritual could realistically develop given what we know of Edenism (it's essentially an atheist, materialist society), it's pretty unique and I'm glad hamilton added it as it makes Edenism strange in an endearing way. I'm sure I could come up with a reason why it's bad if I tried, but I'm uninterested in doing so.
In any case, once the eggs and zygotes are paired, the voidhawk deposits its crew and captain onto a Habitat (think a giant O'Neill cylinder made out of modified coral polyp) and starts its mating/death flight.
Sinon diverted his attention away from his wife to the flock of voidhawks matching pace with the ledge. There were over seventy waiting, latecomers rising into view as they left their crews behind on the other ledges. The emotional backwash from the waiting bitek starships was impossible to filter out, and he could feel his own blood singing in response.
It wasn't until he and Athene reached the passage to the airlock that he noticed an irregularity in the flock. Iasius obligingly focused on the starship in question.
That's a blackhawk! Sinon exclaimed.
Amidst the classic lens shapes it seemed oddly asymmetric, drawing the eye. A flattened teardrop, slightly asymmetric, with the upper hull's dorsal bulge fatter than that on the lower hull; from what he supposed was prow to stern it measured an easy hundred and thirty metres; the blue polyp hull was mottled with a tattered purple web pattern.
The larger size and various unorthodox configurations which set the blackhawks apart, their divergence from the voidhawk norm (some called it evolution), came about because of their captains' requirement for greater power. Actually, improved combat performance was what they were after, Sinon thought acrimoniously. The price for that agility usually came in the form of a shorter lifespan.
That is the Udat, Iasius said equably. It is fast and powerful. A worthy aspirant.
(Sinon is Syrinx's father and Athene's latest husband/lover. He's not super important in this book beyond dying).
I wonder if there being a blackhawk in the group will be important? /thonk
What does a mating flight look like, you ask?
Iasius laughed uproariously across the communal affinity band; it could feel the ten eggs inside its body, glowing with vitality, their urgency to be born. Without warning it streaked away from the pedestal, straight towards the waiting flock of its cousins. They scattered in delighted alarm.
This time there was no counter-acceleration force required for the crew toroid, no protection for fragile humans. No artificial safety limits. Iasius curved sharply, pulling an easy nine gees, then flattened its trajectory to fly between the endcap and the giant metal arm of the counter-rotating dock. Weak pearl-white sunlight fell on the hull as it moved out of the ledge's shadow. Saturn lay ahead, the razor-sharp line of the rings bisecting it cleanly. The Bitek starship headed in for the planet-swathing streamers of ice crystals and primitive molecules at twelve gees, stray dust-motes and particles brushed smoothly aside by the distortion field's bow wave. Enthusiastic voidhawks raced after it, looking more and more like a stippled comet's tail as they emerged into the light.
[additional text]
By the time it reached the Encke division the power surplus was enough to energize the first egg. Iasius let out a shrill cry of triumph. The other voidhawks responded. They had followed tenaciously, striving to match the giddy helter-skelter route Iasius had flown, boring down the passage it had broken through the ring mass, desperately deflecting the whirling particles tossed about by its wake. The leader of the flock kept changing, none could equal the speed, nor match the carefree audacity; often they were caught out by the savage turns, overshooting, blundering about in a squall of undisturbed particles. It was a test of skill as well as power. Even luck played a part. Luck was a trait worth inheriting.
When Iasius called the first time, Hyale was the closest, a mere two hundred kilometres behind. It surged forward, and Iasius relented, slowing fractionally, holding a straight course. They rendezvoused, Hyale sliding in to hold position ten metres away, their hulls overlapping perfectly. Ring particles skidded round them like snow from a ski blade.
Hyale began to impart its compositional pattern through their affinity bond, a software DNA flowing into Iasius with a sense of near orgasmic glory. Iasius incorporated the Hyale's structural format into the vast energy squirt it discharged into the first egg.
[additional text]
Udat caught up with Iasius near the inner edge of the Bring. It had been a long, arduous flight, straining even the blackhawk's power reserves, testing manoeuvrability as seldom before. But now Iasius was calling for a mate again, and Udat glided across the gap until their distortion fields merged and the hulls almost touched. It sent Iasius its own compositional pattern through the affinity bond, swept away by a fervent gratification.
I thank you, Iasius said at the end. I feel this one will be something special. There is a greatness to it.
The egg cannoned up from its ovary, sending out a cascade of polyp flakes, and Udat was left to exert its distortion field to brake the intrigued, eager infant as Iasius departed. The puzzled blackhawk had no chance to ask what it had meant by that last enigmatic statement.
I welcome you to life,Udat said formally, when it had finally stopped the seven-metre globe from spinning.
Thank you, Oenone replied. Where are we going now?
To a higher orbit. This one is too close to the planet.
Oh! A pause as it probed round with immature senses, its giddy thoughts quietening down. What is a planet?
Oh look, the blackhawk is the parent of Oenone. I wonder if that'll matter?
The first purpose these flights serve is, as you might have gathered from the extract above, to promote diversity and evolution through fitness. By challenging other voidhawks to match its speed and carefree flying, Iasius ensures that its children will inherit genes associated with speed, power, and agility (and luck, if that's also inheritable). Secondly, the flight allows Iasius to provide its eggs with energy thanks to the energy-rich region around a gas giant. Thirdly, it's a way for Iasius to experience flying free of the restraints imposed upon it by concerns for its crews wellbeing --the bitek starship able to cut loose and accelerate hard enough to wreck interior fittings.
See, voidhawks don't wait around to starve to death; they go out on their own terms.
[Iasius has released all of its eggs by now]
Iasius continued to descend, its lower, faster orbit carrying it ahead of the others. Its distortion field began to falter, finally overwhelmed by the intensity of the gravitational effect five hundred kilometres above the gas giant.
The terminator rose ahead, a black occlusion devouring the silently meandering clouds. Faint phosphene speckles swam through the eddies and peaks, weaving in and out of the thicker ammonia-laden braids, their light ebbing and kindling in hesitant patterns. Iasius shot into the penumbra, darkness expanding around it like an elemental force. Saturn had ceased to be a planet, an astronomical object, it was becoming hugely solid. The bitek starship curved down at an ever increasing angle. Ahead of it was a single fiery streak, growing brighter in its optical sensors. The darkside equator, that frozen remote wasteland, was redolent with sublime grandeur.
[additional text]
Iasius reached the extremity of the ionosphere. The light of the dying ring particles was hot on its lower hull. A tremulous glow appeared around its rim. Polyp began to char and flake away, orange flecks bulleting off into the distance. The bitek starship began to lose peripheral senses as its specialist receptor cells grew warm. Denser layers of hydrogen pummelled the hull. The desent curve began to get bumpy, vexatious supersonic winds were beginning to bite. Iasius flipped over. The abrupt turn had disastrous consequences on its avian glide; with the hull's blunt underside smashing head on into the hydrogen, the starship was suddenly subjected to a huge deceleration force. Dangerous quantities of flame blossomed right across the hull as broad swaths of polyp ablated. Iasius started to tumble helplessly down towards the scorching river of light.
After giving birth to their eggs, voidhawks choose to go out in a literal blaze of glory rather than sit around waiting to starve to death, unable to move, and lacking a sense that is as integral to them as touch is to us. While this may be something of an alien viewpoint to me, I can understand why they'd choose to do that.
In any case, we then spend the next 5000+ words following the life of Syrinx from her retrieval from Oenone's egg to her (and Oenone's) eighteenth birthdays. Over the course of this, we see Syrinx develop into a willful, bold girl full of dreams about flying through space. We also see that, like voidhawks, Habitat's are intelligent beings with their own personalities, though there's are partially formed by those Edenists who have lived within them and transferred their personalities into the Habitat's neural substrate upon death. We actually see this occur when Syrinx's father, Sinon, dies of old age. In a touch of irony, this act of transference gives the atheist culture a very tangible afterlife and allows the dead to stay with their families for a time. I say a time as, typically after a century or two, the personalities of the dead slowly merge with that of the Habitat unless they make a special effort to hold on.
As you might imagine, this death and the talk with her mother that followed inspires Syrinx to talk to the Habitat she lives in, Romulus, about religion and it's there that we see Syrinx is not a typical Edenist (and that Edenists as a whole are kind of like those smug internet atheists you saw in the early 2000s only much less racist).
While I won't bother reproducing it, we essentially get an infodump about when Edenism started to diverge from mainstream human culture. Essentially, the developer of Affinity and a major figure in Bitek's development, a man named Wing-Tsit Chong (and no, I don't know if that's a real name or a yikes name but I assume the latter), kept it secret that a mind could operate in Bitek neurons until he died and transferred his mind into a Habitat. As you might expect, this resulted in incredible backlash from both Christianity and Islam, with religious proscriptions being placed on the idea of memory transference and, eventually, affinity usage as a whole. Now, how effective this would be at stopping the use of affinity and biotechnology, I don't know, but pissing off the two biggest religions would probably have some impact so it's realistic enough for me.
Now, I mentioned before that Edenism was a democratic society which used consensus-based decision making to decide on the actions it could take, but we also learn that it's, in many ways, a socialist society wherein:
Everybody had a share in its financial, technical, and industrial resources, everybody (thanks to affinity) had a voice in the consensus which was their government.
Hamilton is not as explicit about that fact as he is with the Moon and Mars (both of which are described as successful Democratic Socialist worlds later on in the series), but I can't really see it being any other way. It's actually quite funny as, going by his other works, Hamilton seems to be a more typical libertarian, though saying that with any surety is a fool's errand without personally knowing the man.
In any case, I arrive at the conclusion that Edenism is socialist as Habitats are run by consensus democracy and provide free housing, free food (in the form of nutrient pastes), and free education for their inhabitants, with private companies seemingly relegated to family-run co-ops and healthcare --presumably-- free at the point of service (it's never mentioned, but it'd be ridiculous for it to cost money after all that's free). There's more to it than that, and as mentioned before, I'll go into detail about it in an aside.
Anyway, after seeing Syrinx grow up and Oenone successfully start its distortion field, we're left with this.
Three hours later Oenone slipped into the gap between Romulus's northern endcap and the counter-rotating dock. It began to curve round, racing after the ledge.
Syrinx saw it expand from nowhere out of the spinning starfield. I can see you! It had been so long.
And I you,Oenone replied lovingly.
She jumped for joy, legs sending her flying three metres above the ledge.
Careful, Oenone said.
Syrinx just laughed.
It slid in over the edge, and hovered above the pedestal closest to her. When it settled she began to glide-run towards it, whooping exuberantly, arms windmilling for balance. Oenone's smooth midnight-blue hull was marbled by a fine purple web.
I'm not sure why Hamilton chose to end the chapter by reminding readers that one of Oenone's parents was the blackhawk Udat. While it is sort of relevant later on in the book (and series) as Oenone displays exceptional flying skills that are implied to be a result of its heritage, it's never anything held against the voidhawk (because that would be dumb) and it's not very relevant right now. If I were in Hamilton's shoes, I'd have probably ended the chapter after "Syrinx just laughed" with maybe a little bit of an aside talking about Syrinx imagining the future.
In any case, it's a chapter I would definitely keep as it serves multiple purposes in the narrative from giving us a broad overview of Edenism and its differences to Adamism, to letting us learn about who Syrinx is as a person and how she differs from other Edenists. My only problem with it is that it potentially introduces too much too quickly, but trying to space things out would just lead to bloat and that's an even worse crime, in my opinon.
Lol, I completely forgot to talk about the final bit of chapter one where Garissa gets nuked with antimatter weapons and 60+ million people die. I am extremely good at let's reads, huh?
I'll edit it in this weekend before doing the next chapter.
Please let me know if this is any good and if you have any questions. I have no idea about what I'm doing so I'm just throwing shit against the wall.
Edenism
Cover image from Peter F. Hamilton's A Second Chance Eden. Art by Jim Burns.
Pictured: The interior of Eden. Visible are the axial light tube used to provide light and heat, the circumfluous sea which acts as a reservoir of saltwater, a town, and the rounded end cap of the habitat.
This post is basically just an explanation of what Edenism is as well as my opinions on the culture as y'all probably won't be getting a great view of it despite the (exhaustive) amount of information in the series. Though I've written a fair amount on Edenism in my last update, I tried my best to avoid drawing on information from later on in the series and from the Confederation Handbook (a book released after the series which goes into even more detail about everything). Naturally, that effort will end here, though I'll still be trying to avoid main plot spoilers.
I'll be doing a similar post about Adamism, so feel free to yell about which culture you'd prefer to live in. I suppose mine is obvious, but I'm basic as fuck, so… /shrug
History
The term Edenist and the overall name of the culture, Edenism, date back to a time before Humans had left the solar system and derive from the name of the first bitek habitat ever created: Eden. Eden was germinated in orbit around Jupiter to act as a dormitory and support facility for Helium-3 mining operations carried out by the Jovian Sky Power Corporation; bitek being the most effective and cost-efficient way of creating a self-sufficient base back then. At the time of the habitat's germination, affinity bonds --the telepathic connections foundational to Edenism-- were unique, allowing one person to control just one servitor. As such, the habitat itself was designed to be self-aware and self-managing as it'd be completely impossible for a single person to regulate everything needed to keep the habitat functioning (and the risk of abuse would be high).
Unbeknownst to the Jovian Sky Power Corporation and the other geneticists involved, Wing-Tsit Chong, the developer of affinity bonds, designed Eden's neural strata with the ability to receive and run a person's thoughts and memories; essentially allowing them to transfer their mind into the habitat's neurons. This exploded into the forefront of public knowledge in 2090 when the slowly dying Chong proceeded to do just that and became the first person in history to transfer their personality into a habitat. As I mentioned previously, this received quite a bit of blowback from Abrahamic religions with Pope Eleanor excommunicating any Christian who continued to use affinity --and, by extension, bitek--, and a similar proclamation followed suit from Islamic authorities (though IDK how possible that last one is).
Shortly after these declarations, the already self-sufficient people of Eden declared independence from the JSKP (and Earth) and became the very first independent nation in the outer solar system; the lunar cities having declared independence decades earlier. As the space industry at the time was very much dominated by the more materially inclined, Eden itself and the community living aboard it were not massively impacted by the religious proscriptions and so continued to use bitek liberally. Earth, meanwhile, abandoned both affinity and bitek; relying instead on advanced cybernetics and technologies such as neural nanonics to replicate and surpass what bitek could achieve.
This split laid the foundations for what would eventually become the Edenist and Adamist cultures; Edenism being defined by its use of affinity and bitek, and Adamism by its rejection of both.
Habitats
Habitats are vast cylinders of living, highly modified coral, always found in orbit around gas giants and, generally speaking, in systems with habitable planets. Almost all Edenists live within habitats with the only exceptions being those few Edenists who live on the ocean-world of Atlantis. Habitats orbit about 500,000 kilometres above the clouds of Jupiter-sized gas giants, well above the flux tube but still within the planetary magnetosphere. Habitats are located there as the only source of power capable of meeting their needs is the magnetic fields of gas giants --conductive cables grown by the spinning habitats generating power through induction.
As you might imagine from the image I shared, habitats are basically biological O'Neill cylinders and thus really fucking pretty. While early habitats saw their population housed within their interior, modern habitats grow a belt of skyscraper-like structures called starscrapers around their middle which house the majority of their populations. Starscrapers are fully self-contained communities with shops, homes, theatres, etc, which allows for the interior to be almost entirely given over to parkland, rivers, etc.
One interesting thing to note about starscrapers is that their apartments universally feature food-synthesis organs. These gross-sounding things aren't replicators, they can't whip up a meal of lamb chops, broccolini, and chips in a flash of light and noise, instead, they merely provide food pastes that taste exactly like what you've ordered… only with the consistency of creamy mash potato. Combined with the fact that apartments appear to be free, this gives people living in Edenist habitats a pretty bloody good baseline quality of life, even if you'd probably go mad eating only food paste.
Material for food-synthesis and for the growth and maintenance of a habitat's living components is attained by mining asteroids (and recycling waste matter). Despite what you may expect, asteroid mining in the context of habitats in no way relies on rough crews of Edenists going out with pickaxes and shovels and what have you. Instead, one end of the habitat is given over to a vast maw and asteroids are simply manoeuvred into it as required. This maw, which dominates an entire end cap all on its own, breaks up the asteroid into digestible chunks before said chunks are broken down with digestive fluids and the material distributed throughout the habitat. Rare metals not used for maintenance are, of course, retained and owned by the habitat as a whole, to be sold off as needed.
I keep saying 'habitat this' and 'habitat that' rather than referring to the inhabitants themselves as habitats are self-aware entities in their own right, with a whole personality and mind of their own. This personality is spread throughout the habitat's entire neural strata and controls pretty much anything that goes on inside from watering plants to directing space traffic. While the personality of a habitat is allowed to develop on its own during the initial growth stage, once that's completed the habitat's personality begins to merge with those of Edenists that have transferred their memories upon their death. Personally, I have my doubts that this is anything more than Hamilton reflecting the optimism that some people have regarding bias-less AI with a slight spin, but in-universe this results in habitat's being like everyones respectable and mature uncle/aunt; I.E trustworthy and incorruptible.
This trustworthiness and incorruptibility is basically a requirement for the habitats as they also happen to be panopticons in the truest sense of the word. See, the interior of a habitat is monitored at all times by the managing personality with visual and auditory sensors located pretty much everywhere thanks to the whole thing being alive. Though this has the side effect of making what little crime that exists impossible to get away with, it's also profoundly creepy and is honestly the one thing that gives me pause when I consider where I'd rather live: an Edenist habitat or an Adamist planet.
Society
In my opinion and going off what we know about them, Edenism is, as I mentioned previously, something of a socialist society. I've already talked about the free food and the free housing that is the right of every Edenist, but I've yet to really speak about the rest of the things that have led me to that conclusion.
One of the bigger things which led me to that conclusion is how the mining of He3 is handled and how the profits are distributed. See, another reason Edenist habitats orbit gas giants, aside from the fact they're used to supply power, is because said gas giants contain large quantities of Helium-3. Without Helium-3, mechanical starships wouldn't be able to fly, Earth's arcologies would collapse, and life, in general, would get very very bad, very very quickly for everyone who isn't an Edenist. Now, while the modern equivalent of Helium-3, oil, is largely mined by private companies whose profits go to shareholders (and lying about climate change), Edenism nationalized its mining efforts after declaring independence and has maintained that situation in the centuries since.
Because said mining is nationalised, profits from each habitat's efforts are kept in a general fund managed by the habitat itself and are made available on a communal basis. This means that if an Edenist wants to do some kind of science experiment, make some kind of artwork, or start their own business and they lack the funds to do it themselves, they can receive a grant or stipend to help them do it.
One side effect of this, and the free housing/food/medicine/whatever, is that there is explicitly no poverty in Edenist society. Sure some Edenists may have more money than others thanks to owning a business selling to Adamists and other Edenists, but no mention is ever made of wealth inequality in the series or in the Confederation handbook. We are told that companies exist in Edenism, but the majority of companies are described as family businesses and no mention is made of multibillion-dollar Edenists corporations outside of the state-run Jovian Bank
Now, as to why Edenism is organized in such a way while the rest of the galaxy uses a depressingly familiar kind of capitalism that leaves some people with nothing and allows others to have the world at their fingertips, I think we have to look to affinity. See, affinity (AKA telepathy) allows Edenists to share their thoughts, feelings, and memories with each other, and a big part of their culture is the near-constant sharing of their emotions with the entire habitat's population. Since every Edenist has the affinity gene from birth (or has the requisite biotech implanted into them if they've converted), this gives Edenists a kind of super-empathy with pretty much everyone they're likely to meet and, I imagine, also lets them see things from another's point of view. While the latter is a little bit too "if we just debated we can sort things out" to me, the former seems fairly believable as I can't imagine anyone being able to rationalize away someone's hunger, illness, or pain when they can feel it for themselves.
Another benefit of affinity, albeit one less visceral than being able to share feelings, is that it allows every Edenist to participate in governing the habitat and system they live in. As I mentioned previously, Edenism relies on consensus democracy to function, however, unlike existing forms of consensus democracy, the Edenist Consensus is portrayed as being along the lines of a giant groupmind rather than a large body of individuals.
As described in the Confederation Handbook:
The Consensus is the collective consciousness of all Edenists living within a habitat, joined through affinity and acting in concert. It is normally called into session once every year, to review policy and mandate new laws.
While it would be unwieldy and annoying to use a single giant groupmind to make every decision that needed to be made, Edenist Consensus (and yes, it is capitalised) can function at various levels to meet a given situation. The lowest level of Consensus is the sub-consensus and is formed whenever a specific problem, such as a broken-down engine, needs to be resolved. Sub-consensuses are made up of those minds which have direct, relevant experience and knowledge with a problem, and can be thought of as acting like a panel of experts. The next level up is the habitat Consensus. The habitat Consensus is made up of every mind residing in a habitat and is used to make decisions that would affect the habitat as a whole: I.E whether to invest in a new external factory module or an additional cHe3 mining system. The next level is formed by all the minds around a gas giant, and the last level is all the minds in a solar system.
This is a fairly flexible structure and it reminds me of anarchism's political organization, though I'll cop to not being well-read on anarchist literature. In-universe it's treated as pretty much superior to every other form of government, though it is influenced by the fact that Hamilton has every Edenist be an atheist and is also presented as making emotionless decisions. While I myself am an atheist, I think the idea of an entire society being atheist is both silly and unachievable, and I think the fact Edenism doesn't let emotion influence their decisions is bad and dumb. While I may get some pushback for that last claim, I think the whole lack of emotion deal has turned Edenism into something of a myopic society.
See, Edenists are strong supporters of the Confederation and all the laws it creates and enforces, and they back it pretty much to the hilt. This honestly makes a lot of sense since habitats and their infrastructure are extremely vulnerable to antimatter weapons; bitek habitats being easy to crack open even in comparison to asteroid habitats. However, the thing about the Confederation is that it has a lot of flaws, and so Edenism's backing of it creates a pretty bad situation for a lot of people. I'll get into the Confederation's flaws more later, but suffice to say, this is my really big criticism of Edenism and I'll get into it again.
Moving on from that…
Education in Edenism is free. Like, straight up, it's free. Granted education in Adamism seems to be free as well thanks to the use of lasers that can write knowledge directly into people's brains, but I feel like it's important to mention.
Edenist education takes the form of knowledge and memories being transferred by the habitat to people via affinity, with the habitat confirming that they've properly absorbed the knowledge as they sleep. This leaves children, teenagers, and adults with a lot of leisure time in their lives as it doesn't take hundreds of hours of studying to learn math or how to rebuild an engine or what-have-you. I would love for this to be a thing in real life as it would make education everywhere easier (and cheaper), and because it'd let people live their lives while also learning new things. The only sketch thing I can really find about Edenism's method is that the Confederation Handbook says morals and ethics are also transferred, but whatever concern I may feel is somewhat blunted by the fact that, well, that happens all the time in real life.
I get the feeling that this was intended by Hamilton to prevent Edenism feeling absurdly superior to Adamism, but, like, we're constantly taught morals at every stage in our life from every point of society. Like, just last month I saw a clip on Twitter from one of the Disney channel's innumerable shows which taught an absolutely deranged lesson. In said clip, the teacher had split the main characters' class into multiple groups with the goal of doing an essay on communism or democracy (because, according to Disney, we obviously all agree that those are totally antithetical to one another ). The primary characters were told to write their essay on communism and worked together to write an essay which scored an A result. They were then given a C by their teacher because, and I quote:
A Show On The Disney Channel said:
"When you get everything right, but you don't do it yourselves, it makes you average."
"'A' divided by three is a 'C'. Look at you. You're all the same. You're average. You're common."
Like, what in the absolute fuck? Leaving aside the fact that any teacher who did that to his students would be an absolute dickhead, what the fuck kind of message is that? I don't mean to alarm anyone, but the Walt Disney Corporation might be turning your child into an Objectivist!
Anyway, shit like that appearing on children's TV is why I'm honestly not that bothered by Edenism explicitly broadcasting morals into your child's brain. Like, fuck it, teach little Timmy how to organize a union and redistribute wealth.
Speaking of 'fuck it' and wrapping up this whole post (nice segway, me), Edenists are very open about sexual relations even in comparison to the cosmopolitan Adamism and are portrayed as being pretty into polyamory (though being a 90s novel, it's entirely for sex and not for relationships). Annoyingly, the fact that this series was written in the 90s and early 2000s means that the LGBTQ+ community is pretty much entirely ignored, and I reckon that's a very dumb move on Hamilton's part for a variety of reasons; especially since Edenists are supposed to be this welcoming, supportive society thanks to affinity. I mean, society in 600 years had better not look anything like our own, or else my pissed off ghost will haunt someone's arse!
If I were writing anything to do with the Night's Dawn Series (and I have some ideas...), I'd 100% make that shit mainstream. I'll talk more about Hamilton's views on sex later (mostly because he doesn't shut the fuck up about it), but for now, the best I can say is that there's room in the universe for queer people to exist, but, for better or worse, they're ignored by the narrative.
Hamilton starts chapter four by telling us that there is something called the Ruin Ring, it orbits a gas giant, it represents the greatest mystery in human history and has been unsolved for more than a century, and that it brought the richest kingdom in human history (the Kulu Kingdom) to its knees. A strong, but fairly standard start for Hamilton.
Seriously though, as has happened in the previous three chapters, Hamilton gives us a comprehensive rundown on the history of the Ruin Ring's discovery as well as details about who made it, out of what, and how. To compress several thousand words into something more manageable, the Ruin Ring is the leftover rubble created by the destruction of thousands of habitats which were, in turn, constructed by an alien race called the Laymil. During this section, we're also introduced to the Confederation's term for alien which is xenoc. Why xenoc? I have no idea. Xeno makes sense, but I don't know what the fuck the c is for.
In any case, we're told that the Ruin Ring masses as much as a moderately sized moon (a very vague statement, I'll say), that there were 70,000+ habitats, that they were destroyed almost simultaneously, and that the destruction was so complete and the decay so bad that it takes painstaking effort to learn anything about the Laymil (just learning their name took 60+ years).
Because the Ruin Ring is so vast, the dangers so great, and the chances of finding useful artifacts so low, scientists had to get creative when it came to getting their hands on Laymil artifacts. And, much like an RPG, that meant outsourcing.
The Laymil research project, based in Tranquillity, a custom-grown bitek habitat orbiting seven thousand kilometres above the Ruin Ring, depended on scavengers to do the dirty work.
The scavengers who ventured into the Ruin Ring were driven by a variety of reasons; some (mostly the younger ones) thought it was adventurous, some did it because they had no choice, for some it was a last resort gamble. But all of them kept going in the hope of that one elusive Big Find. Intact Laymil artefacts raised huge prices on the collector's market: there was a limited and diminishing source of unique alien objets, and museums and private collectors were desperate to obtain them.
There existed no prospecting technology which could sift through the Ruin Ring particles and identify the gems amid the dross; scavengers had to don their spacesuits and get out there amid the hurtling shell splinters and go through it all one piece at a time, using hands and eyeballs. Most of them earned enough from what they found to keep going. Some were better at it than others. Luck, they called it. They were the ones who found a couple of the more intriguing pieces each year, items which would tide them over in high style for months at a time. Some were exceptionally lucky, returning time and again with pieces the collectors and research project simply had to have. And some were suspiciously lucky.
Chapter four is also where, in my opinion, we meet the second worst character in the entire series and that's really saying something considering who the competition is. While I've seen some criticism calling him an author insert, or a Gary Stu, or what have you, I think the character's flaws are much more basic than that and much less forgivable. See, this guy, Joshua Calvert, is the real main character of the Night's Dawn trilogy, and while he hits a lot of the same marks as an author insert, his big problem is that he's just kind of a prick.
Calvert is styled after the loveable rogues of old, and while he has the ego for it and the skills to back up said ego, some of his actions are pretty shitty and he isn't quite charming enough to the reader to counteract his worst actions. The really annoying thing is that I find myself liking him for long stretches of the book, and then he does something that rubs me the wrong way and I have to roll my eyes and move on. Just to be clear, it's not like I hate him or think that Hamilton's character writing is poor (I think it's fairly strong, though possibly could improve), it's just that Calvert can be kind of gross and kind of a prick in this book, and it's really annoying when it happens. He does grow up later on in the series, but a risk of having a character grow from being a tool to being a not-tool is that people will still dislike the character.
Anyway, I'll get into it more when it happens, but here's Calvert's introduction.
If pressed, Joshua Calvert would have to admit membership of the second category, though it would be a self-deprecating acknowledgement. He had pulled six decent pieces out of the Ring in the last eight months; a pair of reasonably intact plants, a couple of circuit boards (fragile but OK), half of a rodentlike animal, and the big one, an intact egg, seven centimetres high. Altogether they had brought in three-quarters of a million fuseodollars (the Edenist currency, used as a base currency by the Confederation as a whole). For most scavengers that would have been enough to retire on. Back in Tranquillity people were shaking their heads and wondering why he kept returning to the Ring. Joshua was twenty-one, and that much money could keep him in a satisfactorily high-rolling style for life.
They wondered because they couldn't feel the intense need burning in him, surging down every vein like a living current, animating each cell. If they had known about that tidal-force drive they might have had an inkling of the unquiet nature lurking predator-fashion behind his endearing grin and boyish looks. He wanted one hell of a lot more than three-quarters of a million. In fact it was going to take nearer five million before he was anywhere near satisfied.
Living in a high-rolling style wasn't even an option as far as he was concerned. A life spent doing nothing but keeping a careful eye on your monthly budget, everything you did limited by the dividends of prudent investments? That sounded like living death to him, suspended inanimation, strictly loser's territory.
It gives us a sense of how desperate the Laymil project (and rich people) are for Laymil artifacts, it introduces the primary currency of the Confederation (which is we later learn is tied to the price of Helium-3 which seems dumb, but okay), we learn that Calvert has a very expensive goal, and we see that he considers living the high life to be a fate akin to death. As someone who lives in these depressing times, I'm annoyed by that last one, but I'll forgive him for he knows not what he says.
We also learn why Old Mate Josh needs five million fuseodollars. He wants to fly.
See, Joshua's dad was the owner and captain of a starship and had told Josh stories about all the places he had been, things he had seen, and government officials he had outsmarted while flying. As you might imagine, these had a profound effect on Joshua and, before he drank and drugged himself to death, Josh's dad instilled a sense of wanderlust into his son; a wanderlust that's driven him to do incredibly dangerous work on the off chance that he'd earn enough money to fix his dad's broken down starship and see the Confederation for himself.
As you might imagine, growing up with a drug-addicted single(?)-parent left Joshua with a poor view of his father and a drive to leave Tranquility; a place most people would consider paradise.
Five million Edenist fuseodollars, the price of repairing his father's starship—although admittedly it might even cost more, the shape old Lady Mac was in after so many years of neglect. Of leaving bloody boring backward Tranquillity. Of having a real life, free and independent.
Scavenging offered him a realistic way, an alternative to indenturing his soul to the banks. That money was out here in the Ruin Ring, waiting for him to pick it up. He could feel the Laymil artefacts calling to him, a gentle insistent prickling at the back of his conscious mind.
Some called it luck.
Joshua didn't call it anything. But he knew nine times out of ten when he was going to strike. And this time was it.
"This place is awful, what with its free housing, free food, wonderful climate, and wealth of activities to do!"
Okay, Tranquility isn't quite like that, but you know what I mean, right?
I'm not really disparaging Calvert for this, I promise. Having grown up in a small city in one of the northernmost parts of Australia, I can understand someone wanting to leave what they see as a boring and backward place in order to see the world and do stuff they can't do there. Mostly I just want to needle a fictional character because I've been stuck indoors for three(?) months and I'm steadily going crazy.
So, after learning that the Laymil were a perfectly ordinary space-faring race, that their habitats were broadly identical to Edenist ones at 50 km long and 20km wide (making them a little fatter), and that they left nothing behind to explain their end, we're given rather a big bombshell. I mentioned previously that the Ruin Ring was formed by the near-simultaneous destruction of every Laymil habitat, right? Well near-simultaneous really means "a few hours". 70,000+ habitats were destroyed in a period of a few hours, and, well…
There were only two possible explanations for that: mass suicide, or a weapon. Neither option sat comfortably in the mind; they opened up too many dark speculations, especially among the scavengers who immersed themselves in the Ruin Ring, constantly surrounding themselves with the physical reality of that terrifying unknowable day over two and a half thousand years ago. A third option was the favourite speculation of scavengers. Joshua had never thought of one.
Anyway, we get a description of Old Mate approaching a fragment of the Ruin Ring just like any of the others he'd investigated over the course of his career; this one a ruined building with bits of soil attached to the base. However, unlike the rest, he gets a feeling that this one will be something special. This feeling, his instincts, will be a recurring thing throughout the Night's Dawn trilogy and are basically an indication that he's not entirely ordinary. It's pretty bullshit and it doesn't help me defend against accusations that he's a Gary Stu, but I can't travel through time (yet) so I can stop Hamilton.
Nonetheless, with his instincts telling him that this'll be a big payday, Josh proceeds to get ready to go outside and scavenge. Over the course of this scene, we get a description of his spaceship (a needle-shaped spaceplane intended for surface-to-orbit work he's modified), and of the man himself (a standard-issue white dude protagonist with longish brown hair). During these descriptions, we learn that his family have received some degree of genetic engineering to help them deal with the rigours of freefall; something that tells us that, for all its concern over affinity, the church's view of messing about with genomes is somewhat nuanced.
We also get, in my opinion, one of the cooler spacesuits in science fiction; one made of programmable matter by Communists from the Moon.
The SII spacesuit had been the astronautics industry standard since before Joshua was born. Developed by the Confederation's only pure Communist nation, it was produced in the Lunar city factories and under licence by nearly every industrialized star system. It insulated human skin perfectly against the hostile vacuum, permitted sweat transpiration, and protected the wearer from reasonably high radiation levels. It also gave complete freedom of motion.
The globe began to change shape, turning to oil and flowing over him, clinging to his skin like a tacky rubber glove. He closed his eyes as it slithered over his head. Optical sensors studding the collar section datavised an image directly into his neural nanonics.
The armour which went on top of his new shiny-black skin was a dull monobonded-carbon exoskeleton with a built-in cold-gas manoeuvring pack, capable of withstanding virtually any kinetic impact the Ruin Ring would shoot at him. The SII suit wouldn't puncture, no matter what struck him, but it would transmit any physical knock. He ran both suit and armour checklists again while he clipped tools to his belt. Both fully functional.
(Don't worry, Mars is also Communist thanks to being founded by Lunar Communists. Socialist at the very least.)
I always imagine this scene as being like the mirror scene in The Matrix:
Though, honestly, this series would benefit from being written by anyone who isn't a straight cis white dude from the 1960s. There's some shit that comes up in the future that I just… woof.
Moving on, Old Mate fucks off out of his spaceplane and enters the Ruin Ring proper; pausing only to lock his airlock door and reveal that, while I don't respect him as a person too much, he's actually reasonably cautious about the dangers of space. As an aside, one thing I really like about Hamilton's detailed style of writing, I wasn't kidding earlier when I said I was condensing 5000+ words, is that he paints a scene for the readers.
Shit like this is what I'm talking about.
The detritus of the Ruin Ring drifted unhurriedly around him, a slow-tempo snowstorm, averaging two or three particles per cubic metre. Most of it was soil and polyp, brittle, petrified chips. They brushed against the armour, some bouncing off, some fragmenting.
There were other objects too, twisted scraps of metal, ice crystals, smooth rounded pebbles, lengths of cabling gradually flexing. None of them had any colour; the F3 star was one-point-seven-billion kilometres away, too distant to produce anything other than a pallid monochrome even with the sensors' amplification. Mirchusko was just visible, a bleached, weary, green bulk, misted over like a dawn sun behind a band of cloud.
Whenever Joshua went EVA it was always the absolute quiet which got to him. In the spaceplane there was never any silence; the hums and whines of the life support, sudden snaps from the thruster-nozzle linings as they expanded and contracted, gurgles from the makeshift water lines. They were constant reassuring companions. But out here there was nothing. The suit skin clogged his ears, muffling even the sound of his own breathing. If he concentrated he could just make out his heartbeat, waves breaking on a very distant shore. He had to battle against the sense of smothering, the universe contracting.
I know it's not everyone's preferred style of writing and maybe I'm giving too much leeway to a novel I read in my childhood, but it makes it super easy for me to imagine just what is going on, so I appreciate it.
Anyway, Joshua makes his way towards the shell segment he has a feeling about, enters the building, disregards a mural because it'd only be worth about 30k fuseodollars, we get a description about what the Laymil looked like (odd), and their genders (one egg-carrying, two sperm-carriers).
A Laymil
After a bit of thought, Joshua reckons that the building he's entered is an office based off the idea that the mural must be the foyer and presumes that the central data storage must be nearby. This whole chain of reasoning seems a bit too neat for me as it could just as easily be the entrance to a fancy apartment building, though I do like how this isn't the kind of book that waves its hands and says "oh no, even though these aliens operate under similar pressures (biological and otherwise), they won't do things like eat, shit, or work in a recognizable manner." The aliens in this series are still aliens (most notably in the way they think), but the simple stuff still works the same way.
We follow him for a bit as he searches through the building and eventually finds a hole in the wall with a length of fibre-optic cable waving out. Naturally, he starts thinking that this is it, his big payday, and then the other shoe drops.
That was when he saw it. An infrared blob swelling out of the Ruin Ring. Impossible, but there it was. Another scavenger. And there was no way it could be a coincidence.
His initial surprise was replaced by a burst of dangerous anger. They must have tracked him here. It wouldn't have been particularly difficult, now he thought about it. All you needed was an orbit twenty kilometres above the Ring plane, where you could watch for the infrared signature of reaction drives as scavenger craft matched orbits with their chosen shell sections. You would need military-grade sensors, though, to see through all the gunk in the Ring. Which implied some pretty cold-blooded planning on someone's part. Someone determined in a way Joshua had never been. Someone who wouldn't shrink from eliminating the scavenger whose craft they intercepted.
It makes sense to do this, in all honesty. I mean, why bother doing all the nasty, dirty work of scouring the ring looking for valuable goods when you can simply wait until you spot an isolated target out of sight of Tranquility and take theirs? Do it right and people will assume your target got unlucky, did something stupid, or took a risk that didn't pan out and will be none the wiser.
This ship, the Madeeir, is actually owned and run by one of the few two-person teams operating in the ring: Sam Neeves and Octal Sipika. In a pretty nasty turn of events, it turns out that Joshua quite looked up to them.
Joshua could remember pleasant evenings spent with Sam, back around the time he started out scavenging, eagerly listening to the older man's tips and tall stories. And more recently the admiration, being treated almost like a protégé made good. The not quite polite questions of how come he came up trumps so often. So many finds in such a short time. Exactly how much were they worth? If anyone else had tried prying like that he would have told them to piss off. But not Sam. You couldn't treat good old Sam like that.
What follows is an honestly pretty tense game of cat and mouse where Joshua tries to stay out of sight of Sam and Octal's ship and they try to, well, kill him. They actually manage to get extremely close one time when Joshua is forced to use a tool from his belt, something called a thermal inducer, to melt a hole in a gash of ice that's too small for him to fit through. In the two seconds the inducer is on and carving through the ice, they manage to align a laser at Joshua's rough location and fire just as he jumps through the hole; the sheer amount of energy vaporizing a three-meter wide area of ice in an instant. In the split second his feet are in the path of the beam, they're charred down to the bone even through the spacesuit and armour, and only the cloud of steam produced by the laser prevents things getting worse by absorbing a great deal of the energy.
Said cloud of steam proceeds to yeet him into the cavern beyond and Old Mate bounces around like a rubber ball; blood streaming from his wounds. Luckily for Joshua, his neural nanonics still work fine and basically cut off all feeling to his legs to stop the pain while giving him drugs and his spacesuit redistributes its remaining substance to seal his wounds. Thus we learn that the flesh is weak and the future belongs to the cold intellects of the machines Confederation technology is pretty neat.
Ironically, all Sam and Octal's actions do is help Joshua find his strike; the debilitated spaceman stumbling across a number of processor stacks during his exploration of the area he's found himself in. Most of the processor stacks are completely ruined, but he finds one that's completely encased in ice. Given that every other object in the Ruin Ring has had to contend with 2000+ years of vacuum exposure, impacts, radiation, alternate heating and cooling, etc, electronics embedded in a block of ice are considered to be in pretty great shape.
Having found his golden ticket to the rest of the universe, Joshua just has to get back to Tranquility. First, he makes his way out of the cavern via another opening and then he gets clever; waiting until he couldn't see the Madeeir and then yeeting himself off the rock.
He waited until he was a kilometre and a half from the cover of the shell section before changing direction, then headed out at a steep angle to his previous course, facing into the sun, nozzles firing continually, building velocity. What he was actually doing was raising his orbital altitude in respect to Mirchusko. A higher altitude would give him a longer orbital period. When he halted he was still in the same inclination as the Madeeir and the shell section, but five kilometres higher. In their lower, faster orbit, the ship and shell section began to overhaul him.
He couldn't even see them any more. Five kilometres of particles was as effective a shield as the output from a military electronic-warfare pod. The neural nanonics kept flashing up a graphic overlay for him, a small red circle around the shell section, his one tenuous link with salvation. He had never been so far from the spaceplane before, never been so achingly alone.
It's actually quite a clever little solution and I'm willing to overlook my doubts of how effective his cold-gas manoeuvring thrusters are in service of the story. I know SV loves to yell about infrared imaging, but I personally have no clue how useful it'd be in this situation so… fuck it.
Through clever use of orbital mechanics, he manages to get behind the Madeeir and proceeds to do something that, annoyingly, makes me respect him a little as a spaceman.
The manoeuvring pack took Joshua behind the Madeeir, the ship a fuzzed pink outline a kilometre ahead of him. He could catch an intermittent view of it through the swirl of particles. Then he lowered his orbit again, a few hundred metres this time, and orbital mechanics reeled him in towards it with painful slowness.
His approach was conducted solely within its blind spot, a cone extending backwards from its reaction drive. All he had to do was keep the bulk of the engine bay between himself and the sensors protruding from the life-support module, and he would remain undetected, especially in the clutter of the Ruin Ring. He also had the advantage that they thought he was dead. They wouldn't be looking, not for anything as small as a suit.
The last hundred metres were the worst. A quick burst of speed, rushing headlong into the twin pits of the reaction-drive nozzles. If they started up now…
Imagine how fucking tense that situation would be. Here you are, tens of thousands of kilometres from the nearest safe harbour, trapped outside of your nice spaceship, and armed only with a belt of tools and a jetpack, and you have to either kill or disable the people trying to kill you. You've sent yourself towards your would-be killers in their one blindspot and all they have to do to get rid of you forever is accidentally burp their main engines...
Anyway, Joshua proceeds to slip past their engines without incident and we get a bit of an info dump as to how scavenger engines work (they turn a hydrocarbon into 75,000-kelvin plasma). Old Mate then proceeds to pull out something called a Fission Blade and snips all sorts of vital components, proving once and for all that knives are the most dangerous weapon of all. Josh then epoxies his thermal inducer onto the side of one of the Madeeir's fuel tanks and loads in a program for it to run.
Ten minutes later, the processor switched on the thermal-induction field. Joshua had programmed it to produce a narrow beam, ten centimetres wide, three metres long. Three-quarters of it was actually projected inside the tank, where it started to vaporize the hydrocarbon liquid. Frenzied currents churned, carrying more fluid into the field. Pressure built swiftly, rising to dangerous levels.
The metal shell of the tank wasn't quite so susceptible to the field. Its molecular structure retained cohesion for almost twenty seconds before the sheer quantity of heat concentrated into such a small area disrupted the valency bonds. The metal turned malleable and began to bulge outwards, impelled by the irresistible pressure mounting inside the tank.
In the Madeeir's cramped cabin, Sam Neeves widened his eyes in horror as datavised alarms shrilled in his brain. Complex ship schematics unfurled across his consciousness, fuel sections a frantic red. Emergency safety programs sent a torrent of binary pulses into the engine bay. None of it made any difference to the rising pressure.
They were contingencies for malfunctions, he realized. This was something else, the tank was being subjected to a tremendous energy input. The trouble was external. Deliberate.
"Joshua!" he roared in helpless fury.
After operating for twenty-five seconds at maximum expenditure the thermal inducer's electron matrix was exhausted. The field shut down. But the damage had been done.
The protuberance swelling from the tank was glowing a brilliant coral-pink. Its apex burst open. A fountain of boiling gas streaked out, playing across the engine bay. Thermal blankets took flight, whirling away; composite structures and delicate electronics modules melted, sending out spumes of incendiary droplets. Madeeir lurched forward, slewing slowly around its long axis as the rocketlike thrust of the erupting tank shoved against the hull.
That's basically where the chapter ends. Sam tries to save it, of course, but Josh cut all the power cables leading to the engine's so they're dead. There's a little moment when the Madeeir spins out of control and almost collides with Josh's paydirt (which, honestly, would have been hilarious and given him a very different character arc), but luck is on his side and he's able to make it back to his spaceplane thanks to octal (who was trying to break in) fucking off back to the Madeeir.
Chapter 4 is still setup for later events, but it's also where the plot starts to take off hence us getting a cat and mouse chase instead of simply reading about a moon or a woman's childhood. Given the length of the series, the number of characters, and Hamilton's detail-obsessed manner of writing, there's another 9 chapters before the meat of the story happens, but things slowly ramp up over time so it's not like we're spinning our wheels until then.
I know I mentioned before that I don't particularly respect Joshua Calvert as a character and that I think he doesn't come across as the author intended, but my occasional disdain absolutely pales in comparison to the absolute fucking prick introduced in chapter 5. Get ready for some bullshit because we're going to see the opposite of Interesting and Effective Character Writing.
Fun note: Having read Worm, I now have an instinctual dislike for anyone with the last name Calvert. By that standard, Josh isn't really that bad.
I honestly don't remember much about him except protagonist, so I guess that kind of speaks for itself.
Looking forward to your thoughts on the next chapter. It has been a while since I read the books, but that description can really only refer to one character.
Fun note: Having read Worm, I now have an instinctual dislike for anyone with the last name Calvert. By that standard, Josh isn't really that bad.
I honestly don't remember much about him except protagonist, so I guess that kind of speaks for itself.
Looking forward to your thoughts on the next chapter. It has been a while since I read the books, but that description can really only refer to one character.
CW: Mentions of sexual assault, torture, other stuff.
Well, he is and it is.
More seriously, Quinn Dexter is one of the biggest mistakes I think Hamilton made when writing this series. He exists to be something of a counterpart to Joshua Calvert, the man who the story follows most closely, in the sense that he's basically Joshua as seen through a mirror darkly. Unlike Calvert, who grew up in a tax haven which provided the basic necessities of life for free and which orbited near a ring of alien treasures, Dexter grew up in the arcology slums of an Earth populated by more than 42 billion people and whose climate is lethal outside of the domed megacities. Much like Calvert, Dexter is driven, clever, and charismatic, and would be a perfectly good antagonist… if it wasn't for Hamilton turning it up to 11.
See, the thing about Quinn Dexter is that he's a Satanist. Not like, a real Satanist, you know, the kind of people who smoke weed, take the piss out of Republican Theocrats, and generally fuck around being pretty non-objectionable, but like an 80/90's Satanic Panic Satanist. Drug use, human sacrifice, torture, murder, evil devil-worshipping sex, rape, all of it is featured in the Night's Dawn series as being the province of Satanists, and it really serves to fuck up the narrative because it's handled so poorly.
My issue isn't so much that Quinn Dexter worships the devil (though Hamilton should have given his in-universe reason way earlier than he does), but that because queer people don't seem to exist outside of the devil worshippers, it looks real bad. Like, super bad. If one of the major and good POV characters was a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it'd go a long way towards assuaging my problems with the narrative since it would be clearer that the actions of Dexter and the cult are mechanisms of control and indoctrination and not just queer people being evil and scary.
As it is, given the lack of LGBTQ+ characters on the side of the (figurative) angels, it's real bad! The way it's written is Yikes as all hell and, like, not good as a narrative device since all the queer people are on the side of the baddies. I personally don't get the impression that Hamilton is consciously queerphobic (or sexist), and what I recall of his later writing is much better on this front, but I think he's unconsciously imparted the kind of latent queerphobic and sexist attitudes instilled into people growing up in the 60s/70s into this series due to not adequately interrogating his writing. That said, I'll cop to being a straight, cis, white dude who grew up reading Hamilton books, so it's entirely possible that I've just missed signs of him being an actually shitty dude due to not wanting to see it.
So that's my problem with Quinn Dexter, the way he and his cult are written, and his role in the narrative. To put it in oversimplified meme form:
Anyway, let's actually start the chapter. I'll get to the slavery thing later.
Like a fool Quinn Dexter had been waiting for the jolt, a blink of cold emptiness which would tell him the voyage had actually taken place. It hadn't happened, of course. The crewman had tugged him into the coffin-sized zero-tau pod, one of thousands arranged in a three-dimensional lattice within the colonist-carrier starship's vast life-support capsule. Unfamiliar with free fall, and hating the disorientating giddiness every motion brought, Quinn had meekly allowed himself to be shoved about like he was so much cargo. The cortical-suppressor collar pinching his neck made any thoughts of escape a pitiful fantasy.
Right up until the moment the pod cover had hinged smoothly over him he refused to believe it was happening, clinging to the notion that Banneth would pull strings and get him off. Banneth was plugged into Govcentral's State of Canada administration as deep as a high magus in a virgin. One word, one nod of her head, and he would be free once more. But no. It hadn't happened. Quinn, it seemed, wasn't important enough. There were hundreds of eager waster boys and girls in the Edmonton arcology who even now would be vying to replace him, hungry for Banneth's attention, her bed and her smile, a place in the Light Bringer sect's hierarchy.
So we find Old Mate Dexter getting shipped across the stars in a zero-tau pod.
At this point in the story we're not told what a zero-tau pod does, but from context it's pretty clear that it's that old science fiction staple: the stasis pod. Later on it's revealed that the zero-tau pod works by straight-up freezing time within itself as an offshoot of the same technology used to manipulate space and jump a ship from one place to another.
We also get an introduction to the cult Dexter is a part of as well as information on a mysterious Banneth woman who holds a great deal of political power in Future Canada. Banneth doesn't actually appear in the series until the very last book in the trilogy, rather she serves to motivate Quinn Dexter as he really wants to get revenge on her for the crime of… not actually giving a shit about him at all. At least she didn't get fridged? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anywho, the reason Quinn ended up in a zero-tau pod is that he was carrying "persona-sequestrator nanonics" into the Edmonton arcology for Banneth when he bolted from a pair of cops like a rookie and got grabbed for his trouble. Going by the name (and some stuff mentioned later in the series), these brain implants hide/suppress someone's original personality and let them be commanded like a puppet/given a new personality. This would have some obviously valuable uses for a cult like Banneth's and criminal organizations in general. This section also reveals some rather Yikes inducing information about the justice system on Earth.
The police couldn't prove he was carrying anything illegal. But the charge of resisting arrest was good enough for the magistrate to slap an Involuntary Transport order on him.
Hmmm, Involuntary Transport. Where have I heard that term before?
*Stares in Australian*
We also get a rather revealing look at how well people who get an Involuntary Transport order are treated.
Quinn felt a red-hot needle jab up his spine pressing in hard. He yelped more with shock than pain, his back convulsing frantically, pushing him out of the pod.
The laughing crewman grabbed him before he hit the mesh bulkhead three metres in front of the pod. It wasn't the same man that had put Quinn into the pod seconds before. Days before. Weeks…
God's Brother, Quinn thought, how long has it been? He gripped the mesh with sweaty fingers, pressing his forehead against the cool metal. They were still in free fall. His stomach oscillating like jelly.
"You going to put up a fight, Ivet?" the crewman asked.
Quinn shook his head weakly. "No." His arms were trembling at the memory of the pain. God's Brother, but it had hurt.
You know, if he wasn't such a prick I'd be on Quinn's side. Unfortunately...
He was frightened the neural blitz had damaged his implants. […] Both of them had passed undetected in the standard body scan the police had given him back on Earth. They had to, possessing the biolectric pattern-mimic cluster would have qualified him for immediate passage to a penal planet.
Being entrusted with it was another token of the sect's faith in him, in his abilities. Copying someone's biolectric pattern so he could use their credit disk inevitably meant having to dispose of them afterwards. Weaker members might shirk from the task. Not Quinn. He'd used it on over seventeen victims in the last five months.
(I'll get to the penal planets sometime later. They aren't super important to the narrative, but this is my thread, so tough shit).
After this scene, Quinn is hauled through the ship towards a spaceplane and --after seeing a bunch of colonists moving about-- realises that he has no idea what planet he was actually sent to. The crewmember hauling him through zero-gravity, the same guy who shocked him, displays some amount of pity and tells Quinn that he's been shipped to a "EuroChristian-ethnic" planet called Lalonde. As you might have guessed by the title, this chapter is where my criticisms of the Confederation and more importantly, this series as a whole, really come to bear.
See, planets in the universe of the Night's Dawn Trilogy are settled on the basis of Earth-region via a system called 'ethnic streaming'... probably because Hamilton wanted to do a Planet of Hats thing.
Ethnic streaming involves a planet going "only people from X region on Earth/y ethnic background can live here" and it's some fucking racist nonsense. Leaving aside the fact that the idea that 600 years in the future, people will give a shit about the same divides as they do now is dumb and insulting, we're talking about people who, mostly, live first-world lives and can take vacuum trains to any city on Earth in a matter of minutes. Like, what happens? Do these people travel through a belt of concentrated racism on their way to another planet and try to knife a person who did the same thing because they came from a city 10 minutes away? For god's sake, it's all but stated outright that different cultures can't live alongside one another without conflict and to that I have to say Γαμήσου!
Hell, if you really want to angry-laugh, the planet which first introduced the concept of ethnic streaming to the universe is New California.
The Confederation Handbook said:
New California was settled during the Great Dispersal, and was the first planet to introduce an ethnic streaming policy, which caused some considerable controversy in the Govcentral senate at the time. However, as the early multicultural colonies were undergoing significant levels of civil unrest, and in two cases outright revolution, this screening process was eventually allowed to remain uncontested. After this, many individual Govcentral states followed suit in sponsoring their own ethnic-streaming colonies.
Originally only residents of the state of California were accepted for immigration, though this requirement has now been relaxed so that emigrants from any ethnic-compatible planet in the Confederation may apply. Immigration is now typically 35,000 people a year.
The planet is a democratic republic with a President, Senate, and Congress. Its constitution is modeled on the original American constitution, but with alterations: typically, the environmental protection clause which ensures against high-population clustering outside San Angeles (the planet pioneered asteroid metal mining and Falling Jumbo foamed lifting bodies (FJs), purely to avoid strip mining), and the permitting of "weak" narcotics. But the right to carry arms was specifically excluded. The population is mainly Christian, though, due to California's excessive numbers of spiritualist cults and evangelical missions, a number of fringe religions flourish. There is a strong constitutional proscription against Islam.
I guess New California could function as a criticism of wishy-washy liberals who are actually super racist, but I don't think so. Realistically, Hamilton just didn't have a clue about California's demographics when he wrote this bit of information and it underscores the stupidity of this particular plot element. Like, IMO there's only one way to justify why an Earth that should be cosmopolitan as all hell would form equally cosmopolitan colonies that suffer from conflict along ethnic lines, and it relies on information revealed in the last book and is still just a rationalisation of a dumb idea.
Hamilton never repeats this plot element in another series (as far as I know), so it's likely just him doing something fucking dumb in order to justify planets of hats/ensure there's still injustice in the universe, but Jesus Christ, mate.
Fuck sake.
Okay, so Quinn learns he's going to the European people planet and that it has aliens on some part of it (apparently aliens are cool, but people from New Zealand should be murdered on sight). He gets carted through a spaceplane carrying several hundred colonists and... oh boy, I don't think this is an intentional metaphor on Hamilton's part.
There was a group of about twenty people sitting in the last section, most of them lads barely out of their teens, all with the same slate-grey one-piece jump suit he'd been issued with. IVT was printed in bright scarlet letters on their sleeves. Waster kids. Quinn could recognize them, it was like looking into a mirror which reflected the past. Him a year ago, before he joined the Light Brothers, before his life meant something.
Quinn approached them, fingers arranged casually in the inverted cross sign. Nobody responded. Ah well. He strapped himself in next to a man with a pale face and short-cropped ginger hair.
"Jackson Gael," his neighbour said.
Quinn nodded numbly and muttered his own name. Jackson Gael looked about nineteen or twenty, with the kind of lean body and contemptuous air that marked him down as a street soldier, tough and uncomplicated.
Jackson takes the piss out of the colonists for being excited that they're going to spend the rest of their lives on some pissant colony world and then complains that he and the rest of the Ivets (the slang term for Involuntary Transportees) are going to have to spend the rest of their lives with them. Quinn reflexively says that he won't and Gael humours him, off-handedly mentioning that he accepts that Quinn will be a hotshot merchant once he's finished his work-time.
Quinn stared at him blankly. "Work-time?" "Yeah, work-time. Your sentence, man. Why, you think they were going to turn us loose once we hit the planet?"
"They didn't tell me anything," Quinn said. He could feel the despair opening up inside him, a black gulf. Only now was he beginning to realize how ignorant of the universe outside the arcology he truly was.
"Man, you must've pissed someone off bad," Jackson said. "You get dumped on by a politico?"
"No." Not a politician, somebody far worse, and infinitely subtler. [...] "So what do we do for work-time?"
"Well, once we get down there, you, me, and the other Ivets start doing ten years' hard labour. See, the Lalonde Development Company paid for our passage from Earth, and now they want a return on that investment. So we spend the prime of our life shovelling shit for these colonists. Community maintenance, they call it. But basically we're a convict gang, Quinn, that's what we are; we build roads, clear trees, dig latrines. You name it, every crappy job the colonists need doing, we do it for them. Work where we're told, eat what we're given, wear what we're given, all for fifteen Lalonde francs a month, which is about five fuseodollars' worth. Welcome to pioneer paradise, Quinn."
Planets in the Night's Dawn Trilogy are typically settled in one of two ways. The first way is the traditional sci-fi way where a multi-stellar government spends countless trillions of dollars/credits/whatevers clear-cutting forests, dredging harbours, building roads, factories, houses, power plants, orbital infrastructure, etc. This is all done to give the first wave of settlers a pristine planet with first-world living conditions and a functional economy that can contribute to interstellar trade right from the word go.
The second way is to not do any of that and instead rely on brute-forcing everything with personpower in the form of eager colonists and slave labourers (both of which come from Earth). Minimal time and effort is spent preparing the way, infrastructure is built on the cheap using prefab structures and one-way dropships sent down from orbit, the initial economy is solely agrarian, and high-tech goods have to be imported at incredible expense. This is all managed by a corporation set up specifically to colonize the planet and which controls a massive slice of the system's economy for over a century after settlement --a fact which ensures that they make megabucks over the decades.
Naturally, the latter method is the most commonly used throughout the Confederation due to its low cost with the former being the sole province of the Kulu Kingdom --the Confederation's only multi-system government.
Funnily enough, the narrative makes it abundantly clear that this is a shitty way to settle a planet and, I think, tries to make the forced transport of criminals out to be the clearly awful thing that it is. The problem, however, is that our viewpoint character for the Ivets is Quinn Dexter and he's an absolute piece of shit. If Quinn's character wasn't so dumb and evil, the Lalonde sections of The Reality Dysfunction would be super strong and present a stark view of the Confederation's injustices and the callousness with which it treats the lives of those it deems lesser.
The worst part is that the Confederation's treatment of Ivets is not massively worse than the treatment of people in American prisons and is in some ways better. Like the modern US, the Confederation pays its prison labour, but like the modern US that pay is both insultingly low and nearly worthless (and it's not like the Ivets can refuse to work). It's not hard for me to picture the modern USA using slave labour in the form of prisoners to colonize a planet on the cheap, so Hamilton making Quinn so evil really undercuts what could have been a strong message.
I guess we should be thankful that the Ivets aren't the colonist's personnel property, but the fact that the Confederation would allow private enterprise to make use of one of the worst systems of labour in the modern western world speaks poorly of them. Like, what other things does the Confederation allow or participate in that should never have continued on into the 2600s? I'll get into it a bit more the next time I do an aside, but as you might imagine I'm pretty bloody critical of the Confederation as an organization.
Anyway, Quinn and company take a spaceplane down to Lalonde's capital of Durringham, during which we get a description of the planet Lalonde.
Lalonde was a world which barely qualified as terracompatible. With a small axial tilt and uncomfortable proximity to its bright primary, the planet's climate was predominantly hot and humid, a perennial tropical summer. Out of its six continents only Amarisk in the southern hemisphere had been opened for settlement by the development company. Humans couldn't venture into the equatorial zone without temperature-regulated suits. The one, northern, polar continent, Wyman, was subject to severe storms as the hot and cool air fronts clashed around its edges all year long. Shrivelled ice-caps covered less than a fifth of the area normal for terracompatible planets.
It's not a great place. Lethally hot and humid across the equator, subjected to near-daily rains, full of dangerous predators. Though it's not explicitly stated, the fact that Lalonde is so unpleasant and the habitable areas so restricted makes me think that it wasn't considered a high priority place to settle; as close to being a single-biome planet as you can reasonably expect.
We're also introduced to a minor recurring character, Gerald Skibbow, and the rest of his family.
An alien world. A new beginning. Gerald Skibbow emerged from the stuffy atmosphere of the spaceplane's cabin, looking about with reverence. Just seeing the solid picket of raw jungle bubbling around the spaceport's perimeter he knew he'd done the right thing coming here. He hugged his wife, Loren, as they started down the stairs.
Frankly, he's more excited to be outside than I'd be if I'd lived my entire life up until that point on a planet that made Caves of Steel seem like babies first arcology. You'd expect some degree of trepidation towards open skies and nature from them, but either they'd gotten counselling beforehand or else there's a restrictive application process. After all, with 42 billion+ people on Earth, a yearly acceptance rate of 0.001% rate would still give you millions of successful applicants.
Regardless, Gerald is joined by his wife Lauren, his eldest daughter Paula (19), Paula's husband Frank, and Gerald's youngest daughter Marie (17). Interestingly for a sci-fi writer, Hamilton does point out that uprooting your nearly adult child against her will, severing all her friendships and relationships, and bringing her to a shitty backwater planet lacking even the most basic of modern conveniences is kind of a shitty thing for a parent to do. Like, ethically it's a bit suss, double so when leaving said planet requires you to do the impossible and save the money for a ticket home (which can run into the tens of thousands of Fuesodollars).
We also see that Lalonde (and by extension almost every planet undergoing settlement) is something of a company town.
Six harried Lalonde Development Company officers were collecting the passengers' registration cards at the bottom of the steps, running them through processor blocks. Once the data was verified, each immigrant was handed a Lalonde citizenship card and an LDC credit disk with their Govcentral funds converted to Lalonde francs, a closed currency, no good anywhere else in the Confederation.
Very little else happens for the next section or so. Gerald fails to notice that Lauren is only here because he wants to be, Quinn and the other Ivets are forced to unload the colonists' gear, and nobody gives a shit that they're basically relying on slave labour and that said labourers are working in a sauna.
The next section of chapter five, however, is a little more interesting. In it, we're introduced to two Edenist intelligence agents operating on Lalonde by the names of Darcy and Lori. The two agents have bribed an immigration official to give them access to the raw files of those immigrating to Lalonde (willingly or not), and are busy running them through a processor block (basically: smartphones six years before smartphones were a thing). One thing that's important to note is that Darcy and Lori have paid the immigration official a bribe of 500 fuseodollars a month to gain access to this information, showcasing once more that Lalonde is both corrupt as hell and cheap.
More importantly, it also tells us that the Edenists are looking for a specific individual and that they don't want the Lalonde Development Company aware of that fact. Given that our first impressions of the planet have been of corruption, graft, and shoddiness, it's pretty clear that the Edenists are doing this because the LDC would probably interfere and make everything harder. Logically, it also means that whoever they're looking for has to be fairly important to them as getting caught subverting a government agent would be politically troublesome. It's also basically stated in the text, but it's unnecessary since it's pretty clear if you think about it.
Towards the end of the section, the man the agents have bribed strikes up an idle conversation (because watching people work is boring as hell, I feel you man), and lets out that there have been a handful of disappearances that the LDC has been keeping quiet for fear of colonists growing afraid and blaming the Tyrathca. Entire homesteads in the Schuster County have been abandoned with no bodies or signs of struggle. Darcy and Lori are naturally interested in the news (intelligence agents, what are you gonna do?) and consider investigating themselves.
Darcy weighed up the options. Abraham and Catlin, their eagles, had enhanced senses, but even so sending them off without even a reasonable idea of where their quarry might be was pointless. They could spend half a year covering Schuster County alone. If they had more operatives he might have sanctioned it, but not with just the two of them. Covering Lalonde's immigrants was a long shot, acting on one piece of dubious information nearly forty years old: that Laton had bought a copy of the original ecological assessment team's report. Chasing off into the hinterlands was completely out of the question.
Wow, I sure hope that Schuster County isn't in any way important.
But hey, we finally learn the name of the person they're looking for: Laton. Wonder what he did that people 40 years later are looking out for him on a backwater world he might have been interested in?
It's a question for another time, unfortunately, as Darcy and Lori decide that they don't have the resources to spare and make a note to ask an expected voidhawk to scan the region. With that done, we're whisked away to the second to last part of chapter five and the introduction of three more secondary characters, one of whom will save billions.
First is Father Horst Elwes, a kindly priest of the Unified Catholic Church 20 years past his prime who is actually kind of cool as far as priests go. Horst very much comes across as that kind of cheeky anglican priest you see on British shows where the parson has to solve a murder every week. That said, one gets the sense that he isn't tough enough to last on Lalonde without getting worn down despite the fact he's somewhat less traditional than you might expect at first. He's just so... soft and naive.
The next character we meet is Jay Hilton. Jay is a precocious eleven-year-old girl who moved to Lalonde with her mother, Ruth. She's somewhat stubborn and she's pretty forthright, but unlike seemingly every other person in their colonist group, she and her mother Ruth are dressed appropriately for the climate and, unlike Ruth, Jay is pretty chipper. Ruth is… basically the same as her daughter, but way more cynical and prepared for the planet.
Ruth and Horst have a rather spirited dialogue about the colonist group's preparedness (or lack thereof), and Ruth basically browbeats him into submission. We are, however, given a rather interesting thought from Horst.
"I still think we might have been given some warning. Perhaps a chance to change into more appropriate clothing."
"You should have carried it with you in the zero-tau pod. That's what I did. There's an allowance for up to twenty kilos of personal luggage in the passage contract."
"The Church paid for my passage." Horst answered carefully. He could see Ruth had what it took to survive in this new, demanding world; but she would have to learn to soften her somewhat mercenary attitude or he could imagine himself trying to calm a lynch mob. He forbade a grin. Now that would be a true test of my ability.
"Know what your problem is, Father?" Ruth asked. "Too much faith."
Quite the contrary, Horst thought, I have nowhere near enough. Which is why I'm here in the remotest part of the human dominion, where I can do little or no harm. Though the bishop was far too kind to put it like that.
While I've somewhat spoiled it with my talk of Quinn Dexter being a prick, it's likely that Horst had a crisis of faith due to his experiences serving as a priest in an arcology and seeing the kind of misery inflicted by the God's Brother cult and the misery that drives people to join it. It's also clear that he was kind of forced to move to Lalonde, but given how he acts in this chapter, it was clearly a move he also agreed to.
In any case, Horst proceeds to steer the conversation to less stricken waters and asks Ruth if she plans to farm or fish for a living once they arrive at their settlement location. In response, Ruth shows that unlike everyone else on the planet, she's actually put thought into what it'll take to thrive on Lalonde and not just survive.
"Not likely! We'll be self-sufficient, of course, I brought enough seeds for that. But I'm a qualified didactic assessor." She grinned roguishly. "I'm going to be the village school-marm. Probably the county schoolmarm, seeing the scraploose way this place is put together. I've got a laser imprinter and every educational course you can think of stored in here." She patted the rucksack. "Jay and I are going to be able to write our own ticket with that. You wouldn't believe the things you're going to need to know once we're dumped in the middle of nowhere."
The Confederation (the Adamist part of it, anyway) writes memories directly into your brain via lasers. This is actually a pretty cool idea as far as future inventions go since it completely changes the way education is handled by society in a way utterly unlike previous shifts. Just imagine for a moment what this invention would do to society even if it were limited to just primary and secondary education? Even ignoring the changes in literacy and numeracy, children wouldn't have to spend 8 hours a day in school; they could instead do an hour or two learning and integrating the knowledge and then spend the rest of the day socialising with others at day clubs or with their families. It'd be a seismic shift in how society has been organized for centuries and while Hamilton barely touches on it, he does, at least, graze the fact.
After that, Ruth points out to Horst that Lalonde is corrupt as hell and that a bunch of their gear has probably been stolen already: hence the fact she's lugging an expensive and heavy piece of kit with her.
The final bit of the penultimate section is a pretty good example of the power of implication and how you don't actually need to explore every background item or event that occurs in your universe. I won't name names, but some series could learn from this. Star Wars.
They walked on in silence for several minutes.
"Ruth?" he asked eventually. "Why have you come here?"
She exchanged a mournful glance with Jay, the two of them suddenly vulnerable. "I'm running away," she said. "Aren't you?"
Yeah, a tough single mother and her child moved all the way to a corrupt stage one agrarian planet for a reason. It's probably got to do with a shitty father or something. Hell, I don't think we ever actually learn Ruth's orientation so it might well be a shitty mother. It's 600 years in the future, tech could let that happen (though it's incredibly unlikely given how Hamilton handles queer characters in this series. Also, you don't get points for things you don't make explicit, so it's almost certainly a shitty father).
This leaves us with the final bit of chapter five. This section is from the point of view of Ralph Hiltch, an older intelligence agent working for the Kulu Corporation (who I'll go into detail about later). Ralph will be important soon, but for now, he's a minor character. The only reason Ralph is here is that the Kulu Kingdom's newest colony is only 22-lightyears away and they want to make sure that Lalonde isn't going to be hostile to their interests. Given how Omuta killed ninety-five million Garissan's in a single strike (I was wrong with the number the first time ), this makes a lot of sense for the Kulu Kingdom to do.
There's very little to comment on this final bit. It's basically a slight expansion of what gets revealed earlier on in the chapter, the mention of character's who'll matter in the future, and the restatement of how Lalonde is especially terrible even compared to other Stage-One colony planets.
So… yeah, that's chapter five. Lalonde sucks, Quinn Dexter is a prick, and the Confederation is a racist slave state. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ah yes, the guy is just as horrible as I remembered.
Fun fact about the memory imprinting stuff: This technology is more of a footnote here, but it was the major plot point of one of Hamilton's earlier novels. He does that a lot, reusing certain ideas or expanding on them in some later story.
In fact, to those who read the Commonwealth Saga, one of the alien species in this story should feel quite familiar. Though they aren't really the focus here, only becoming somewhat relevant in the third book.
I'm talking about the Tyrathca and the Prime, who are clearly similar in nature. The Tyrathca's true face is only shown in book three though. I read Commonwealth first, and have to say their deeds seem pretty tame if we compare them to the prime. I mean, they are capable of peaceful interaction, if only at gunpoint.
That's a feeling also given by some more parallels between Night's Dawn and Commonwealth, just think of the Neutronium Alchemist.
Depressing to see slavery as a thing in the future, as well as the present. Wonder if more modern sci-fi books, written in the late 2010s onwards, contain such things?
Ah yes, the guy is just as horrible as I remembered.
Fun fact about the memory imprinting stuff: This technology is more of a footnote here, but it was the major plot point of one of Hamilton's earlier novels. He does that a lot, reusing certain ideas or expanding on them in some later story.
In fact, to those who read the Commonwealth Saga, one of the alien species in this story should feel quite familiar. Though they aren't really the focus here, only becoming somewhat relevant in the third book.
I'm talking about the Tyrathca and the Prime, who are clearly similar in nature. The Tyrathca's true face is only shown in book three though. I read Commonwealth first, and have to say their deeds seem pretty tame if we compare them to the prime. I mean, they are capable of peaceful interaction, if only at gunpoint.
That's a feeling also given by some more parallels between Night's Dawn and Commonwealth, just think of the Neutronium Alchemist.
Depressing to see slavery as a thing in the future, as well as the present. Wonder if more modern sci-fi books, written in the late 2010s onwards, contain such things?
Would you look at that, I'm updating my commentary. It's a Christmas miracle!*
* Alright, I've actually been weirdly productive this holiday season. I've also written my next update for In the Ruins of Their Cities which I highly advise you all to check out because I want attention.
From Tasmania to Sardinia populations fled storms, famines, diseases, and wars. Species once thought rescued from extinction or too widespread to be impacted underwent drastic die-offs that rendered them almost mythical to generations of children. Nations once thought impervious to harm suffered...
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Chapter six begins with Syrinx and her brother tracking an Adamist starship as it lines up with its next destination. Oenone and its sibling Graeae, Syrinx and her brother's respective voidhawks, are engaged in stealth mode and we get a pretty decent and realistic explanation for how that works.
I think this is it, she told Thetis. Graeae, her brother's voidhawk, was drifting a thousand kilometres to one side of Oenone; the two voidhawks had their distortion fields reduced to a minimum. They were operating in full stealth mode, with minimal energy expenditure. There wasn't even any gravity in the crew toroid. The crew hadn't eaten any hot meals, there had been no waste dumps, all of them peeing and crapping into sanitary bags, and there was definitely no hot water. Blanket webs of heat-duct cables had been laid over Oenone's hull and crew toroid alike, then smothered by a thick light-absorbent insulation foam. All the starship's waste heat was siphoned off by the blankets and radiated away through a single dump panel, always orientated away from their prey.
It's neat to get a fairly hard sci-fi explanation of how stealth in space works, though after years of nerds on SB/SV whining about it, I am a little over the idea.
Regardless, Hamilton rapidly goes on to establish that Syrinx and co have been tracking the Adamist starship for nearly three weeks at this point, that they're carrying a 20-strong platoon of Confederation marines, that they're four years into a seven-year term of service with the Confederation Navy (which honestly seems a bit excessive, but okay), and that Syrinx is dating a man 100 years older than she is (though it is pushing the limits a bit).
We also learn that, for the last eight months, they've been assigned onto independent interception duty under the Confederation Naval Intelligence Service. Despite what you may think, this doesn't mean that they go off all half-cocked and Dirty Harry random antimatter dealers, rather it means that they go after independent traders who are smuggling antimatter; independent traders being people who both own and operate their starship. As you might imagine, operating a starship in this setting is pretty fucking expensive, so the idea that random dudes might smuggle Genocide Juice is not super unreasonable. Certainly if there are enough of them out there, some might fall to the temptation --enough that Syrinx and her brother have chased after two others and gotten very annoyed when they failed to find antimatter.
This was the third chase flight the CNIS had sent them on: the first ship had been empty when they reached it; the second, a blackhawk, managed to elude them with its longer swallow range, much to Syrinx's extreme chagrin. But the Dymasio was undeniably guilty; the CNIS had suspected it of carrying antimatter for some time, and this flight proved it. Now the ship was preparing to enter an inhabited system to make contact with an asteroid separatist group. This time they would make their arrest. This time! Oenone's cabin atmosphere seemed compressed by the prospect.
We also learn a little about how Edenists and Adamists interact, or at least how Syrinx and Adamists interact. While I could quote the actual text, it's effectively just that Syrinx has no way of knowing how the Adamists she talks to really feel, having never had to try and work out if people are simply lying about their emotions for one reason or another. This makes a fair amount of sense as I imagine it would be quite difficult for people who are constantly and viscerally aware of each other's emotions to meet people who can't or won't do the same. You'd likely miss a lot of social cues when speaking to them and it'd be intensely frustrating for both sides.
I mean, god knows that Americans and British people can have some pretty wild misunderstandings and I've been assured by trusted sources that the British are indeed capable of emotion.
Anywhooo…
The Dymasio vanished. Syrinx felt the sharp kink in space as the ship's patterning nodes warped the fabric of reality around her hull; to Oenone the distortion was like a flare. One that was totally quantifiable. The voidhawk instinctively knew the emergence-point coordinate.
Huh, look at that. Another reason why voidhawks are so much better than Adamist starships and everyone is dumb for rejecting Bitek.
Syrinx and her brother proceed to follow the Dymasio as it jumps closer to the system of Honeck, taking advantage of the fact it takes time for Adamist starships to redeploy sensors after jumping to arrive undetected. After the Dymasio arrives, it proceeds to activate its fusion drive and align itself for a jump into Honeck --something that's a bit nerve-wracking for our neighbourhood Edenists given that it's carrying antimatter. Syrinx wants to go after the starship before it can head further in, but she's quickly talked around to the idea of waiting for the buyers (separatists from one of the system's asteroids) to arrive by the CNIS officer.
It makes a fair amount of sense to wait to capture both the buyers and the courier, especially as they hope to find out the location of the antimatter production station, but it's definitely one of those high-risk choices that can backfire hard. Like, imagine if someone had a mobile nuke production facility somewhere in the world and was selling nukes to whoever had the cash? You'd want to find out where the facility is so you can blow it to shit, but you also want to avoid nuclear weapons being traded in major cities. I wouldn't want to be the guy who said you should hold off on intercepting a meeting only to have them nuke downtown LA out of spite once you arrive to clean up a network.
In any case, Syrinx talks to her brother about how it rankles her and we get a decent sense of their relationship from the exchange.
Did you catch all that? Syrinx asked Thetis.
Certainly did. And she's quite right.
I know, but… She broadcast a complex emotional harmonic of eagerness and frustration.
Bear with it, little sister. Mental laughter. Thetis always knew how to tweak her. Graeae had been born before Oenone, but there was a marked comparison in size; with a hull diameter of a hundred and fifteen metres Oenone was the largest of all Iasius's children. And it wasn't until puberty's growth hormones came into effect that Thetis outmatched her in physical tussles. But they had always been the closest, always competing against each other.
I've never met anyone more unsuitable for a captaincy, Ruben chided. No composure, all teenage recklessness, that's your fault, young lady. I'm jumping ship when this is over, bugger what the contract says.
We also meet Ruben, Syrinx's beau, for the first time and he's p. cool. Bit of an old fart, but at least he's willing to take the piss out of people on occasion.
Syrinx and co then spend the next fifty minutes waiting for the Dymasio to align on the gas giant Kirchol before, finally, following it in. After the Dymasio arrives, it proceeds to broadcast a message down towards the gas giant whereupon it's answered by another ship --a Blackhawk. Having lost the last Blackhawk they tried to intercept due to the mercenary ship's greater jump range, 19 light-years versus 15, Syrinx and Oenone call dibs on this one much to her brother's annoyance. To offset any rancour, Syrinx tells Thetis that he'll get the next Blackhawk and the honour of claiming this capture.
As the two ships they're tracking finally rendezvous, Syrinx orders the interception to begin.
Gravity surged back into the crew toroid, building with uncomfortable speed. Oenone and Graeae streaked in towards their prey at eight gees. Oenone was capable of generating a counter-acceleration force of three gees around the crew toroid, which still left Syrinx subject to a harsh five gees. Her toughened internal membranes could just about take the strain, but she worried that the blackhawk would try to run. Their crews nearly always used nanonic supplements, enabling them to withstand much higher acceleration.
It's interesting to note how Hamilton portrays the combination of Edenist and Adamist technologies as being superior to the use of one over the other. This is actually pretty consistent throughout the series and is no doubt a deliberate move on Hamilton's part. In many ways, despite claiming to be rational atheists who use beep boop logic and reason, Edenists prove to be just as dogmatic about the use of Bitek as their Adamist cousins are; the difference being that they use it for everything rather than nothing and in doing so miss out on the potential synergies such as using nanotech to reinforce the bodies of your crews in addition to the genetic engineering used and the counter-acceleration forces. That said, the Edenists also miss out on some of the potential of bitek as is explored later in the series so maybe they're just scientifically conservative. .
Luckily for Syrinx and her crew, however, the Blackhawk they're intercepting, the Vermuden, elects to surrender and so gives in without a fight; collapsing its distortion field and holding position 2,000 kilometres from the Dymasio. However, as Oenone moves in to deliver the platoon of Confederation navy marines it's carrying, well...
Syrinx ordered the Vermuden's captain to extend the blackhawk's airlock.
The Dymasio exploded.
Its captain, faced with the total certainty of a personality debrief followed by a Confederation Navy firing squad, decided his crew and ship were a worthwhile price to pay for taking Graeae with him. He waited until the voidhawk was a scant kilometre away, beginning its docking manoeuvres, then turned off the antimatter-confinement chambers
So it turns out that making a crime carry an automatic death penalty could have some negative consequence when attempting to arrest folks. In this case, the captain of the Dymasio, knowing that he would have his memories mined, be found guilty of the crime of smuggling antimatter, and be formally executed, felt that taking vengeance on the ship that arrested him was more important than the lives of his crew and so chose to commit suicide.
Oddly, despite antimatter being seen as this horrifying substance by the general public and not just national governments keen to keep a monopoly on force, the amount of energy released by 500g of antimatter annihilating 500g of matter is only equivalent to a 21 megaton nuke; something that isn't uncommon in this setting. As planetbusters exist and release as much energy as 100+ Teratons of TNT, we're left to believe that either Hamilton fucked up his math (eminently possible) or that antimatter is pretty easy to smuggle into places compared to nuclear devices in addition to being ridiculously energetic.
Either one of the above options is acceptable, so I choose to believe both simultaneously.
Anyway, back to the death of Syrinx's brother and the incredible trauma that would cause.
Affinity acted like a conductor for purple-white light, allowing it to shine straight into her own mind, a torrent of photons that threatened to engulf her sanity. In amongst the glare were fissures of darkness, fluttering around like tiny birds caught by a gale. They called out to her as they passed, mental cries, sometimes words, sometimes visions of people and places, sometimes smells—phantasm tastes, a touch, the laughter, music, heat, chill, wetness. Minds transferring into Oenone's neural cells. But broken, incomplete. Flawed.
Thetis! Syrinx cried.
She couldn't find him, not amid such turmoil. And the light had become a pervasive pain. She howled in anguish and hatred.
The Blackhawk Vermuden, taking advantage of the distraction provided by the Dymasio's self-immolation, proceeds to GTFO while everyone's distracted; swallowing away quickly enough that Oenone's gamma-ray lasers rake empty space. Using its distortion field, Oenone works out that the Blackhawk did the greatest possible jump it could and yeeted itself 21 light-years away, 6 more than Oenone can manage.
Pissed off, Oenone decides to chase after the Vermuden anyway. Syrinx, though pretty naturally drowning in grief at the sudden death of her brother, is shocked enough by Oenone's determination to yell that it's a stupid idea but Oenone argues that she knows a way to catch them.
She waited helplessly as the interstice engulfed them, some treacherous aspect of her subconscious granting the voidhawk permission, urging them on towards retribution. Worry faded when she saw the wormhole was only thirteen light-years long. As its terminus began to open, she felt the patterning cells activate again. Realization was instantaneous, and she laughed with vengeful fury.
What follows is a section in which the Vermuden pops into space and relaxes, safe in the knowledge that no Voidhawk could match its emergency jump and that they'll be able to jump away and be in the free and clear once they do. Unfortunately for the Vermuden, they're swiftly painted by one of Oenone's targeting lasers; the Voidhawk having carried out two jumps in quick succession to catch up. Hamilton goes on to have Syrinx explain that it takes a particular level of skill for a voidhawk to be able to carry out sequential swallows like the kind Oenone did, but I do find it to be a bit of a weird lapse from the Vermuden and its captain to just not consider it being done to catch them. Being able to carry out such a move isn't described as being difficult due to energy costs (though obviously, those would play a role), so I'd imagine that a mercenary Blackhawk captain, especially one doing shit like helping to smuggle antimatter, would at least be wary of Voidhawks pulling sequential jumps.
It's a minor nitpick, however, so I'll move on quickly. I do want to make a note of this exchange between Syrinx and Oenone, though.
I mourn for him too,Oenone whispered into her mind, its thoughts drenched with regret.
Thank you. And Graeae's eggs have been lost as well. What a terrible, filthy thing to do. I hate Adamists.
No, That is beneath us. See, Eileen and the marines share our loss. It is not Adamists. Only individuals. Always individuals. Even Edenists have our failures, do we not?
Yes. We do, she said, because it was true enough. But there was still that fraction of her mind which remained vacant, the vanished smile.
Syrinx might be twenty-five here, but she's spent the overwhelming majority of her life dealing only with other Edenists and her only other exposure to Adamists has been as part of her duties in the Confederation Navy (and even that's a bit questionable). Imagine how much it would colour your views if someone from a group of people you only barely interacted with killed your brother?
Hate is a pretty natural albeit unhelpful response, especially considering this event occurred only a few hours ago at most, so I can't really fault her for feeling nor do I think this kind of trauma will ever really leave her. While my memories of the rest of the series are currently pretty hazy, I recall Thetis's death coming up several times and colouring her interactions with certain Adamists, so I'll give credit to Hamilton as it's not just a bit of pointless drama but instead a meaningful, if painful, thing to happen to a character.
After handing over the captain and crew of the Blackhawk, Vermuden, to the fleet port authority at the system of Oshanko and getting some local Edenists to assume command of the bitek starship, Syrinx and Oenone return to Saturn to inform Syrinx's mother on the Romulus habitat and to grieve.
While Syrinx falls into something of a depression over her brother's death and the thought that she's responsible, her mother instead points out the good that Thetis achieved.
He did what he wanted to. He did what was right. Tell me how many millions of lives would have been lost if that antimatter had been used against a naked planetary surface?
A lot, Syrinx said numbly.
And he saved them. My son. Because of him, they will live, and have children, and laugh.
But it hurts!
That's because we're human, more so than Adamists can ever be. Our empathy means we can never hide from what we feel, and that's good. But you must always walk the balance, Syrinx; the balance is the penalty of being human: the danger of allowing yourself to feel. For this we walk a narrow path high above rocky ground. On one side we have the descent into animalism, on the other a godhead delusion. Both pulling at us, both tempting. But without these forces tugging at your psyche, stirring it into conflict, you can never love. They awaken us, you see, these warring sides, they arouse our passion. So learn from this wretched episode, learn to be proud of Thetis and what he accomplished, use it to counter the grief. It is hard, I know; for captains more than anyone. We are the ones who truly open our souls to another entity, we feel the deepest, and suffer the most. And knowing that, knowing what you would endure in life, I still chose to bring you into existence, because there is so much joy to be had from the living.
It's a pretty lengthy quote and I recall it being much easier to read in the physical book simply due to the way bold text works there, but I reckon the speech itself is a pretty decent one. It may be unrealistic for a mother to actually feel this way considering she just learned that her son has died (even though, yes, Edenists can share their emotions and receiving emotional support is probably much more visceral a thing for them), but personally, I think this is an act. It's not necessarily that she doesn't think Thetis saved a great many lives, objectively he did, but I think that Athene is playing a part so that her daughter doesn't get swallowed up by grief.
It's supposition at best and I don't recall the text supporting it at all, but it seems right, ya know?
Regardless, sometime after this conversation with her mother, Syrinx returns to her childhood home to recuperate and speaks to her deceased father's personality. After a little back and forth, it's revealed that the speed of Thetis' death was such that they could only save his most foundational childhood memories and that his personality in the Habitat's multiplicity will be that of a 10-year old boy. Syrinx, wishing to speak to him, visits her brother, appearing in one of his memories of when they were children; standing on the shore of one of the Habitat's rivers along with a raft made of recycled goods.
The resulting conversation is… painful but somewhat fulfilling for Syrinx. Thetis is the boy she remembers him being, but that's all he is. He'll never grow up, certainly not into the man he once was, and he'll never be anything else. As Syrinx watches her brother's ghost join his friends on the raft, she asks her father what will become of him and how long he'll last as an individual in the Habitat's multiplicity.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be flippant. Probably about ten or fifteen years. You see, even childhood will ultimately pale. Games that defy adults and friends that mean the whole world are all very well, but a major part of what a ten-year-old is, is the wish to be old; his actions are a shadow of what he sees as adult behaviour. There is an old saying, that the boy is the father of the man. So when he has had his fill of adventure and realizes he will never be that man, that he is a sterile child,his identity will fade out of the multiplicity into the overall personality. Like all of us will eventually, Sly-minx, even you.
You mean he will lose hope.
No. Death is the loss of hope, everything else is merely despair.
How dare you get themes in my space opera, let alone a thesis statement!
For real though, while I've been trying to avoid spoiling things too much, I feel it necessary to point out that this exchange contains some of the fundamental themes of the series. It may get a little murky as the series goes on and we get some cool space combat shit, but the idea that death is the loss of hope is a fair bit more important than you might imagine and will come up several times.
After this exchange with her father, they have another in which they have a brief discussion about religion and how Adamists have to rely on faith while Edenists have a concrete afterlife --albeit one that's quite different from the various faiths of the Adamists. I missed it the first time I read the series, but this discussion shows us that while Edenists may generally be pretty much Hollywood/early 2000s atheists, Syrinx and Sinon are somewhat more thoughtful about the topic than you might imagine. While still not believing in the idea of a deity, Sinon is at least understanding of the difficulty of believing in an afterlife you'll never see until you're, you know, dead, and that it would be extremely difficult for most people to have faith in such a thing.
As the chapter comes to a close and Syrinx ruminates on the idea of souls, afterlives, and her brother's stunted existence, and eventually...
Emerging from the jumble of doubt and misery was the tenuous wish that the Adamists were right after all, and there was such a thing as God, and an afterlife, and souls. That way Thetis wouldn't be lost. Not for ever.
It was such a tiny sliver of hope.
Oenone's thoughts rubbed against hers, soothing and sympathetic.
If there is a God, and if somewhere my brother's soul is intact, please look after him. He will be so alone.
It's been a long time since I read this. Intereesting to see it here. There's stuff I'll say about stuff after stuff happens to stuff. And stuff.
But for now... I think Quinn is boring. He awful, but his greatest sin isn't how insulting he is. I mean, real life has given us army officers selling classified information to neo-nazi satanists. I find the whole "god's brother" religion silly, even with... well, you know. Stuff. I find the sexual aspect of Quinn offensive. But his greatest crime is that I don't care.
It's been a long time since I read this. Intereesting to see it here. There's stuff I'll say about stuff after stuff happens to stuff. And stuff.
But for now... I think Quinn is boring. He awful, but his greatest sin isn't how insulting he is. I mean, real life has given us army officers selling classified information to neo-nazi satanists. I find the whole "god's brother" religion silly, even with... well, you know. Stuff. I find the sexual aspect of Quinn offensive. But his greatest crime is that I don't care.
Quinn is terminally lame. I suspect that it was intentional on Hamilton's part to make him a loser with a jumped-up ego, but it does mean that a loser with a jumped-up ego is one of his primary characters.
I got to the point in the Salvation Sequence where the megacorp tries to justify kidnapping and exiling people it deems criminals to a barely hospitable planet with few supplies and zero organization before dropping it. While I hope that later on in the series Hamilton shows it to have been both completely fucked morally and a massive mistake, I haven't bothered looking into it since.
