The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton
'The Reality Dysfunction' is a long book, a twelve-hundred page barnstormer-cum-doorstop and the first in a trilogy, so if you are a reader who spreads reading across weeks you are signing up for a commitment. Hamilton builds one of the most gloriously overstuffed futures I have ever visited, the Adamists who reject bitek for religious and cultural reasons and the Edenists who possess the affinity gene, which allows telepathic communication between one another and the construction of bitek constructs including sentient, living starships (voidhawks) and enormous space habitats, and he spends the first half of the book building its incredible society before the plot takes a sudden twist that turns everything on its head. And what a plot: the dead become able to possess the living. It kicks off on a muddy frontier colony called Lalonde, where Quinn Dexter, a convicted criminal, banished to a work camp on the frontier world who is a member of the Light Brother sect (devil worshippers), cracks something open, and the encounter creates a fracture in some aspect of dimensional space which allows the souls of the dead to return from 'The Beyond' and possess the living. Suddenly it is a horror story set in a massive sci-fi universe, and it should not work, mixing space opera with literal ghosts, but Hamilton manages to bind horror and sci-fi together well, SPACE GHOSTS and all. This starts to drag as we're introduced to Lalonde, a recently colonized jungle world, concentrated on one world and its inhabitants in painful and unnecessary detail. The cast is immense, maybe way too many characters, and some threads shine, the psychic sexaholic space-captain Josh Calvert who is basically a young Han Solo, while others frankly annoyed me?? There is Laton, an Edenist who has rejected his society and, for lack of a better term, 'gone bad', who is billed as a potential new evil to supplant Quinn but his story is kept largely hidden from the reader in order to protect vital secrets, and then he pretty much drops out of the story around page 500, presumably to reappear in the sequel. And the sex, god, the sex, if I wanted to read about throbbing members I would have read a book with Fabio on the cover, page after page of gratuitous sex scenes which add nothing for the reader other than a cringe. It should have been tighter and shorter, self-restraint by the author is not his strength. But the ambition is genuinely infectious, Hamilton manages to pack in a jaw-dropping amount of stuff, both plot and big ideas, an unwieldy behemoth so hard to define because it encompasses everything. I resented the page count going in. By the end though: it is a brick for sure, but now I'm more than eager to start book 2 in the trilogy.