The Reality Dysfunction

This book is a brick, in every sense of the word, and I mean that as a warning more than a criticism. My paperback edition is thick enough to prop a door with, and the first several hundred pages are a genuinely disorienting scatter of seemingly unrelated storylines, new characters, new planets, new political factions, dropped on you with almost no hand-holding. I put it down twice in the first two weeks. I’m glad I picked it back up both times.

Somewhere around the third act, and it really does feel like flipping a switch rather than a gradual ramp, the threads that seemed disconnected start braiding together into something you genuinely couldn’t have predicted from the setup, and the payoff for all that patience is real. Once it kicked in I read the back half of this thing in about a week, which for a book this size is not something I do often.

Hamilton’s universe building is the actual draw here, dense to the point of occasionally overwhelming, but genuinely lived-in in a way that a lot of space opera doesn’t bother to earn. The horror elements that show up partway through, and I won’t spoil what they are, caught me off guard in a good way, since I’d gone in expecting a fairly conventional far-future political thriller and got something stranger.

I’ll say the honest thing plenty of other readers have said too: this does not stand alone. It’s the first third of a trilogy dressed up as a novel, and it ends on enough of an open thread that you’re basically obligated to pick up the next one if you made it this far. I already have. Recommended, but only if you’re the kind of reader willing to trust an author for four hundred pages before he shows you why.