The Gathering At The Fountains

The Void Trilogy is three books that are really just one long, enormous book: The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void, and The Evolutionary Void. They don't stand on their own even as installments in a series and must be read one after another, no dawdling.

I didn't enjoy this as much as the Commonwealth Saga, its predecessor, which I remember as being dense but interesting science fiction. It had a lot of characters, in a lot of locations, but all were distinct and memorable and their stories slowly converged in a satisfying way. This book (all three of it) is written to the same formula, but bloated to the point where so much was happening, and for so little reason, that the people, locations, and factions all ran together despite them being on many different planets, which also ran together. The only memorable parts of the book were Edeard and Araminta, and in the beginning I mostly kept reading for Edeard, though I became less interested in him as time went on and he became so powerful that all that was left to do was wait for the corruption to set in. Luckily Araminta started to get more attention around that same time.

I think perhaps Hamilton is best held to two volume books because this story seriously got away from him in three. There was stuff in here that just did not need to be in here, and then once it became relevant again (if it ever did) Hamilton did not give a flying fuck whether you remembered it or not and refused to give you a hint even if it was referencing something from the last book or two thousand pages ago.

It's so long that by the time you get to the actual climax of the series it's like, they ask a guy not to do the thing that'll end the universe, and he's like, idk, and then they ask him once more with feeling and he's like, well, okay. There's plenty of excitement on the way, but talk about anti-climatic. And then everyone goes home to a happy ending because no one (with insurance) ever dies in this universe. They just get downloaded to new bodies. Though you do kind of forget about that while you're reading because the characters are in so much peril.

Also, and I don't know how else to put this, but every reference to sex read like it was written by a man, like the beautiful identical twins who married the same man, and the one guy in multiple bodies who told his singular-bodied girlfriend that he had to fuck other women with his other bodies while he was with her because she (the girlfriend) just made him so hot, baby.

The eye rolls I rolled.

Still, obviously I found something compelling about this in order to spend, according to Libby, something like 72 hours reading it. But if you're looking to get into granular space operas, I don't think this is the place to start with Hamilton.

( Status Updates from Goodreads )

Contains: Descriptions of sexual violence; graphic physical violence; animal harm/death; references to forced impregnation and forced abortion; "Oriental" used to describe people; lingers on fatness in a way that isn't positive; mind control; cops; and for the ebooks: so many OCR errors I was instantly transported back in time to 2009.