The Evolutionary Void Book

A rousing end to hamilton's most ambitious hard science space opera yet. the author certainly believes in the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, as this trilogy (although it is truly more of a quintet) includes EVERTHING: artificial intelligences, sun-diving, galactic religious movements, bionic enhancements, alien species (including a sci-fi explanation for ELVES for chrissakes), a range of modes of space & time travel, mysteries that have lasted a millenia, lots of space battles, detailed world-building, and an incredibly large & often over-sexed cast of enjoyably cartoonish characters featuring scientists, starship commanders, politicians, everyday joes & janes, immortals, mystics, and my personal favorite, the tormented yet quip-filled super-agent who just wants to get the job done despite having to deal with multiple massacres occurring in both his dreaming and waking hours. my gosh, poor super-agent...what a life!

aside from the page-turning narrative and the wall-to-wall concepts thrown at the reader, the most fascinating thing to me about this pleasantly over-stuffed series is its engagement with another genre: High Fantasy. in hamilton's previous series Night's Dawn, he engaged successfully with the Horror genre in his depiction of souls returning from the dead to destroy the living, centuries upon centuries in the future. In that novel, the horror and the hard science were woven carefully together. in this series, the High Fantasy is kept at more of a remove by the creation of two distinct narratives that often reflect upon each other. the parallel adventures of Edeard in the "magical" city of Makkathran may appear minor-note compared to the expansiveness of the space opera that surrounds his various tales, but Edeard's journey from village outsider to Master of Space & Time is just as compelling and may merit a separate read, outside of the space opera itself. at the very least, the detailed descriptions of the psychic powers of the Edeard & his countrymen are absorbing & thought-provoking; even more interesting to contemplate are the lessons that Edeard learns about the impossibility of attaining perfection in relationships, in human nature, in creating the perfect utopia. surprisingly heady & tragic ideas lurk within the fantasy, although the reader who prefers fast action on a galactic scale may soon grow frustrated with the inward-leaning tales of Edeard.

although the characters and their dialogue are often simplistically two-dimensional (Edeard aside), and the sentimentality is at times a bit much, overall this is a marvellous achievement by hamilton. the author is a man of many ideas!