Peter F. Hamilton, who I think is one of the top science fiction authors working today, collected six short stories and a novella set in the same Confederation Universe as the hugely successful Night’s Dawn trilogy and published them as A Second Chance At Eden. The tales preceed the time of the trilogy, focusing on the affinity technology—genetic engineering which connects human minds directly to other geneered animals and technology—and offering some of the history leading up the trilogy including one, Escape Route, which might have originally been intended to be part of it.
Escape Route and the novella A Second Chance At Eden are my favorites. The former is an episode from the life of Marcus Calvert who owns the starship Lady Macbeth and is the father of trilogy leading character Joshua Calvert set just a few years before it and the latter is a lengthy murder mystery set hundreds of years earlier in bitek habitat Eden, orbiting Jupiter, the birthplace of those humans who invent and then choose to use affinity.
The reason I enjoy Hamilton’s writing so much is that he’s got a terrific imagination that results in epic, simply massive plots with both strikingly original technological developments and well-drawn, grabbing characters. A couple of the stories in this volume, Sonnie’s Edge and Candy Buds, are prime example, being essentially character studies that a less capable author would have left in the notebook but here are delightful short reads with unforeseen plot twists.
New Days, Old Times makes clear that amazing technology can’t compensate for our communal emotional immaturity. The Lives And Loves Of Tiarella Rosa is enjoyable, the one love story in the bunch, though it seems built as a way for Hamilton to deliver a neat punchline; Deathday is the only one that truly didn’t work for me as I couldn’t get into the story’s only character and the key conflict.
recommended
BillSaysThis 