This book single handedly made me stop reading sci-fi/fantasy for several years, which I guess I should be thankful for. The ending to this book and series is honestly one of the most incomprehensibly badly written endings to any book I've ever seen, and it was especially stunning given how highly regarded this series seems to be. The series itself is full of misogyny, has a blatant self insert as a main character who every woman finds super sexy and who solves everything amazingly perfectly but it has enjoyable moments and although the set up is kind of ridiculous there are some cool ideas - the series has REALLY cool aliens, comparatively, who are actually sketched interestingly and I really liked the scenes they were in. And then. You get to the ending of this. And it makes everything that came before come that much worse. Details are somewhat hazy 6 years from when I read it but what actually happened was at least as absurd as what I say.

The ending is a literal deus ex machina. Fair enough, it's telegraphed throughout the book. But. So they find this thing which is literally like a kind of god. And it's also like some sort of genie wishing thing. And then of course the main character "takes responsibility" for resolving the plot. And he becomes god for a while. And it's the most macho thing. He's got the perfect brain to not go ~mad with power~ apparently and so he just does the necessary "common sense" things. One of the things of the book is that each alien species has to deal eventually with all the dead people who are trapped in the other dimension, they have to find some way to soothe their pain and let them carry on. So what does main character do? He does something dimensionally so all the dead who are possessing human bodies are sent back into the afterlife. IIRC they go to the "good" afterlife this time but there's a specific point about humans "not being responsible" enough or something so they couldn't do things "properly" but it was an absurd solution to a big built up point and to the entire plot of the books - like 2 pages "right they're gone now we don't have to deal with that, thanks god". There's also a plot thread about one of the alien species preparing to invade human planets. This is solved by all the human planets being moved far away to a different part of the galaxy. They're also made closer together to reduce fuel problems. No, seriously. All the plot points in the books which have been built up over and over are just done, 10 pages max. All the dead characters we've seen before? No serious goodbyes, they just go. And main character gets his perfect dream life where he gains superhuman powers too. Woooo. Great book.

I realised after reading this that so much sci-fi is like this - crappy self insert character with a bad plot that even if it has good ideas or good "world building" inevitably fizzles out in an awful way, after way too much writing. It was a good wake up call. Don't read this series. Oh and another thing - the entire second book is almost 100% irrelevant - the big plot point throughout the book gets tossed right near the end and barely anything else actually happens ( )

I've said it before, these books are too damn long. I think the majority of the problem is that Hamilton takes half of his wordcount and puts it into character-building and while this is admirable, his characters are kind of shit. Louise is the damsel in distress, Dexter is almost literally the force of all evil and Joshua is Space Adventure Cobra, and while SAC was just silly enough to be thouroughly entertaining, Joshua just permanently pissed me the fuck off (and I'm not even mentioning fucking Al Capone...). Ione could have been a pretty cool powerful woman in the series except that she does almost nothing of consequence. I think you can throw thousands of pages at these characters while not adding a millimeter of depth to them because they are just so very archtypical.

All in all, I don't actually mind the characters being bad, that is not really what I'm looking for in a gigantic space opera series. I'm looking to have my brain crammed full of fresh ideas about a time that i will never experience. It did dissapoint me because in between these books I read the entire "Rememberance of Earths past" series by Cixin Liu which does exactly that. So, while I'm not actively annoyed at Hamiltons' character building, I am kind of mad that it took up such a large part of the series to the point that I was simultaneously exited to read the rest of the series and entirely unmotivated to wade through hundreds of pages with fucking Al Capone. Also, having read this last installment I am not sure what the point was of book 2. At all.

So, I did enjoy myself with these books, but they were not worth the massive amount of time and discipline I put in reading it. (I know, I know) ( )

I loved this, but geez, thank God I'm finished. :)

I also fully intended to come back and really review this with a really real review. Really. But I finished it two weeks ago, and I think my relief at just being DONE has overwhelmed any real need to review it. It was a good read. It was a satisfying conclusion. I can definitely see why people would be pissed with the deus ex machina, but with the entire premise of the story, it really didn't annoy me that much -- especially since I was just so relieved to be done. The entire idea in the first place was far-fetched; in some ways, I think you needed to have a deux ex machina just to tie it up, because I can't imagine any plausible way to solve the entire issue otherwise.

Edit:
It is now June 10, 2014, two years and five days after I finished this series. I never did come back to review it -- I think, after getting through it, I was so exhausted by it that I didn't have anything to say.

However, I do look at this series as one of the best I've read, despite how sprawling the universe is and how out of control the characters are. I've returned to it briefly a couple of times intending to re-read it, but never gotten past a couple of chapters. Someday I will return -- which is saying something -- and I'll probably bring with me a reading guide of some sort. There was just too much variation in the characters for me to be able to follow along without taking copious notes and checking a wiki with chapter changes, especially as the series got on.

Well worth the read, though, and oh, to be able to read it for the first time again. :)
( )

The third volume of the Night's Dawn trilogy suffers the same flaws as the previous two; it is over-long and has too many characters leading to over a dozen endings (maybe - I didn't actually count) rather than a neat conclusion. Much of the time instead of enjoying the current scene I was wondering what was going on elsewhere with other characters, only to get back there and find myself wondering what was going on elsewhere with even more other characters. The ending is obvious to readers of the first two volumes just from the title of the third, at least in principle and rather unsatisfying. It feels as if Hamilton's ambition was not quite matched by his skill. ( )

This particular novel was almost 1,200 pages and between it and the other two in the ongoing single story that takes up this trilogy, it's almost 3000 pages. Let me stress this: It's a single story. This isn't a huge ongoing big-book deal like the one Robert Jordan made... but it's close.

And it's epic Space-Opera with anti-mater explosions, the dead coming back to take over the living, vast interstellar exploration, hunting for a god, and lots and lots of regular people just happening to make up pop superstars, Al Capone, runaway rich kids, and the fate of us all... considering the idea that souls persist. The dead come back. And we have a choice to make... as a species.

The aliens refuse to get involved. They had to make their own choices when it came to this.

In the meantime, humanity is devolving in a war between possessed bodies and the high-tech remaining populace. Earth is under siege. Both sides are running out of options even with the ability to transmute matter, move whole planets, put themselves in zero-tau, or live in shared-consciousness ecologies. :)

Just... wow. The ideas and the buildup is freaking amazing.

BUT. I should mention, the execution is often bloated, full of long sequences about nothing much in particular, and while it helps develop characters, there's just SO MUCH OF IT and I found myself wanting the really BIG stuff to happen. And it eventually does. The reward for putting up with over 50 hours of this third novel is well worth the wait. :) BUT.

My observation? Be patient. Enjoy the ride. It's not a race. Enjoy this honker of a novel for what it is and watch the original Poltergeist again for the sheer enjoyment of it. :) ( )