Review: The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. HamiltonReview: The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton

The Reality Dysfunction

The holiday season is over, and you’re looking to return at least one well-intended gift.  What should you get to replace it?  How about The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton? The Reality Dysfunction is the first book in Hamilton’s trilogy Night’s Dawn. It is the 27th century, and the human species has begun a great diaspora throughout the galaxy. New technologies have enabled humans to side-step Einstein’s cosmic speed limit allowing us to colonize worlds light-centuries away. Disease and genetic defects are things of the past, and new “bitek” (short for biotechnology) even allows for “affinity” (telepathy) between those who choose to have the affinity gene spliced into their DNA.

Enter Lalonde. A backwater planet rich in natural resources but completely untamed. Lalonde is one of nine hundred planets that Earth has colonized or has begun to colonize. Life on Lalonde is brutal, low-tech, and hard. The colonists have only a few years to get their homesteads up and running before economic collapse is certain, but something is watching them. Something evil. Not long after settling in (in the roughest of terms), the reality dysfunction begins. The dead begin to come back to life. Not dead bodies, mind you. No, the dead begin to return to the realm of the living by taking over bodies still enjoying life. Thus begins a battle mankind has never even dreamed possible.

The dead return with strange powers which baffle the technologically advanced living, and as they return, certain specific dead people return, like Al Capone. Killing the  host of the dead spirit has the unfortunate side-effect of slaying the host him or herself. The death of the host only then adds to the amount of people trying to come back from the void which is the afterlife. The problem is easy to see. Also, the only goal the dead have is staying alive once they attain a living host. They will commit any act, regardless of how heinous, to stay newly alive.

The problem on Lalonde is not the only problems facing the human race in the Night’s Dawn trilogy. There are aliens. For the most part, humans have encountered alien species which are either so far beneath us in terms of technology that we cannot be bothered much with them or technologically advanced races which take only a passing interest in us.  Two aliens species, the Tyrathca and the Kiint, belong to the governing body of humanity—the Confederation. In fact, the Kiint seem like our best possible hope for a solution as they claim their species has faced its own reality dysfunction—and survived. The Confederation is concerned with the safety of humanity and its allies. But starships with the fire-power to take out small planetoids becomes nothing more than frustrating when facing the return of the souls of the dead.

The Reality Dysfunction is a fast-paced read. Space battles happen in real-time. Readers learn how space warfare occurs at speeds which boggle the human mind. The horror of facing the return of the dead through the medium of the bodies of the living earns the book its back page teaser: “Space is not the only void…” The trilogy is enjoying a reprint.  The first American release broke each book in the trilogy into two books. These were The Reality Dysfunction: Emergence and Expansion. The other titles The Neutronium Alchemist: Consolidation and Conflict as well as The Naked God: Flight and Faith were conflated as well.