Reviews for Judas Unchained

The average rating for Judas Unchained based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-17 00:00:00 Jaime Urrea I have a confession to make: the Grumpy Cat is my spiritual animal. The confession was necessary because seemingly everybody and their brother loved the book. Everybody except for grumpy me that is. Let me remind you that in the previous book the humans of the future opened a Pandora Box and let some aliens with Highlander motto ("There can be only one") out in the wild. The latter happily proceed to exterminate our future race. End of book 1. This one picked right where the previous one left. Humans have two problems: external total extermination threat coming from the guys I just described and internal sabotage from undercover baddies. They - the humanity - tried to solve both problems in parallel never failing to fail (sorry for a bad pun; I could not resist) at both at any given moment. The biggest problem was the pacing. It was so bad by the middle of the book I felt like my enjoyment of reading disappeared replaced by boredom similar to that coming from doing a routine bland job. Even when I was reading action scenes I always had an impression I was watching a movie about a snail racing in slow motion. Really frustrating was the fact that Hamilton can write good action scenes (please refer to last 200 pages of his Reality Dysfunction book). If anybody would ever call for nomination of currently living scifi authors with the greatest imagination I would nominate Peter F. Hamilton without a second thought. He could describe different location on different planets in such details that you can almost feel being there. Now consider that each scene switch starts with 2-3 page description of the surroundings and that the action takes place on multitudes of worlds and places and you already have 400 pages worth of descriptions creating the pacing problem. On the related note all of Ozzie's scenes can be removed from the book without disrupting the tale at all. This would be like 200 pages extra. Mellanie's as well, but I will talk about her later. Let me talk about the plot. We all love to read about an occasional failing of the police to apprehend an especially smart criminal - as long as it does not affect us; if it does we become very loud about it. The keyword here is "occasional". In the book the police and related secret services failed every single assignment. After about third time it all became very predictable (example: the assignment - apprehend a bad guy. Result: a couple of dead policemen and the bad guy still enjoys his freedom) and thus boring; I was never a fan of Pink Panther. Do not make any mistakes: modern police can be very efficient. What changed in the future? Please note again: Hamilton can write about efficient police work; refer to Great North Road. So the humanity is about to be totally wiped out but they are still reluctant to do any decisive action for the fear of hurting the aliens' feelings. The latter killed billions of people on different planets and humans, having the weapons capable of dealing with the menace once and for all, are too busy singling Kimbalaya. If you think I am joking this is exactly what they did the second half of the book: tried to come up with the solution to avoid genocide while being killed planet by planet. I mean what does it say when the politicians whose job is to protect you care more about the murderous aliens than their own people? Combine it with 100% inefficiency I mentioned about and you will realize why I got bored. Some time later I realized that if I switch teams and start rooting for aliens the book became fun again. At least aliens did not sing Kimbalaya. Last but not least: depiction of women. Please do not get me wrong: I am not asking for strong women to be present having been fed up with pathetic attempts of some authors to depict such (please refer to books with a woman blacksmith who works as an assassin part-time; I am too lazy to search for titles, but will do it if there is a demand). All I ask is for woman to be not as useless as main heroines here. Paula Myo. She is with the police and is supposed to be very competent. Well she could not catch a group of smugglers for 130 years!!!. Yes, I said years. All of her missions failed, and in addition she got too sick at exactly the moment she could do something for a change. Add to this the fact that she is completely emotionless and her development was exactly zero: she did not change a bit from the beginning to the end and I have no idea why people consider her to be a good example of a "strong woman". Sexism much? Mellanie Rescorai. She was so gorgeous every single guy within 1 kilometer of her fell in love. She, being of a soft heart, could not resist anybody. To put it blindly, she fucked every male who came in contact with her. This is how she got to the top and remain there. While I have nothing against reading sex scenes the moment I get to her POV I had only one question: who was she going to have sex with this time? Justine Burnelli. A boring spoiled rich brad became a boring politician. She had exactly one excitement happening around her and she spent the whole scene being scared and in shock. I could go on, but it is a good place to stop. I always thought the last book of Night Dawn trilogy with its mother of all Deux Ex Machinas was bad, but I am more disappointed in this. Failure after failure, fear of making any decisions, uselessness of some characters and pacing killed not only the duology, but my desire to read anything else from Peter F. Hamilton. It looks like I have already read the best he can offer.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-10 00:00:00 Troy Fitzgerald 6.0 stars. On my list of "All Time Favorite" Novels. As has been mentioned before, this book is really the second half of a much larger book began in Pandora's Star. When counting the first book, this story comes in at almost 2000 pages. As daunting as that may seem, I was amazed by how easy it was to stay focused on the story. All of the different plot lines were so interesting and well done that I was never waiting for the pace to quicken. No doubt, Hamilton spends considerable time on details and minor plot points, but he does it so well and adds so many interesting bits about the universe that it never seems to drag. In addition to Hamilton's superb writing, the two greatest attributes on the novel are (1) the incredibly detailed, complex plot, the gradual but steady advancement of which is the common thread throughout the story and (2) the universe of the "Commonwealth" that is as good as any I have ever seen in science fiction (yes including giants like Dune and The Foundation Trilogy). This series raises the bar considerably on what grand scale space opera should be. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!