As promised, I’m on the second book of Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy and with the entire Confederation now aware of the crisis, it’s action-packed right from the start. I’d complained earlier that my main issue with the first book was the character of Joshua Calvert being set up as the stereotypical action hero. He does get a little less of the limelight but unfortunately we also get another copy of him? While still very entertaining, I like this somewhat less than the first book, partly because the Confederation is rather smart about containing the possessed, so they don’t turn out to be as large-scale a threat as they initially seemed. Plus, I strongly dislike the new possessed leader characters such as Al Capone. I mean, really?

The name Peter F. Hamilton was not familiar to me and I thought I knew all of the big name science-fiction writers. While popular and commercially successful, this trilogy is closer to being space opera and so never won any major awards which could be why I never noticed it. The books are also notable for being huge doorstoppers. That kind of length isn’t that unusual for the current era of web series but present real logistical issues when printed on paper. The cast of characters is extensive and Hamilton takes his time to describe his setting so the plot doesn’t really get going until a few hundred pages in. For a long while, I enjoyed the action adventure story well enough but couldn’t see much point in it. Then the action got started and I must admit that I got hooked.

I’m continuing my deep dive into great science-fiction books that I missed out on back in the day so here’s one that was first published in 1993. It’s another book that is difficult to read because it’s full of slang words whose meaning you’re expected to infer from the context, there are no chapter breaks and it freely segues between the perspectives of different characters. Working one’s way through it is well worth your while however as it is simultaneously a very science-fiction novel, being a very detailed account of ordinary life on the surface of the Moon and a very mainstream one as it is an old-fashioned coming-of-age story.

I’ve had this novel on my list of books that I want to read for so long that I’d given up all hope of finding it. Many writers and critics loved it when it was published but it seemingly never found commercial success, few copies were printed and no ebook version was made. Now nearly 30 years later, it has finally been made available in electronic form. Naturally I’m among the first in line for it and like everyone else I am awed by how ahead of its time it was as a masterpiece. Even so, I can also see why it might have struggle to find success back then. Almost all of its grand revelations are from interviews by the protagonist, so it’s very much a case of telling instead of showing. This isn’t a good science-fiction novel in the conventionally marketable sense but it is breathtakingly original and unique.

Going back to the well of great science-fiction novels I should have read long ago but didn’t, here’s one that I now believe is the single best depiction of the literal end of the world. This book is singularly focused on a slow and detailed description of exactly how the Earth is destroyed and has little else. Even the identity and motivations of the alien attackers are left as mere guesses. The aliens are simply so much more powerful than humans that they don’t even need to explain themselves and there is no question of fighting back. The downsides are that it’s very USA-centric so we have little idea of what is happening in the rest of the world and there are no women point of view characters. But I admire its audacity and like it a lot.

I’ve read plenty of short stories by Harlan Ellison though I don’t consider myself to be much of a fan. His novels are not considered notable and I suspect that a large part of his legacy comes from his contributions to television shows like the original Star Trek and Twilight Zone. His Dangerous Visions anthologies were hugely influential however and this final book was announced in 1973 and never came out. Ellison died in 2018 but his estate’s executor J. Michael Straczynski continued working on it and so now here it is.

This is one of the vintage science-fiction books I’ve been dipping into from time to time, one of the recommendations I got from YouTube. I found it notable in that it can be sharply divided into two parts which are very different from one another. I’d characterize the first part as a fairly stereotypical military SF story of the era that feels like it’s working towards the protagonist becoming an action hero. But then partway through he gets killed and then things get really crazy. Unfortunately I didn’t really like either part and I disliked the low-key sexism throughout. The best thing that I can say is that it’s a short book and so was easy to get through.