The thing with Hamilton, though I love his work, I can't help but feel that his storytelling has gone downhill from the heady days of Mindstar and Night's Dawn. There's now a lot of cliche and obviousness in his storylines. Great North Road I found very slow in the first half, very predictable in the second, and then wrapped up quickly like Hamilton got bored of it once he hit his required page count. The Void books I found might as well have been a fantasy book, so little was set in the Confederation proper. I liked the setting of Fallen Dragon, but Hamilton did the same trick of a deux ex machina ending to get it all wrapped up at the last moment. Neal Asher, Charles Stross and Richard Morgan have managed to keep their quality up, and I feel that's not the case with Hamilton.
I agree with you about Reynolds though. They are amazingly written, incredibly dense, but they do have a stark desolation about them that somehow fits in with the star-spanning worlds he builds. When that crew is stuck on the lighthugger, you really feel they are light years from anything but each other. When they are chasing each other across the galaxy at near light speed in House of Suns, you feel the weight of all those years at relativistic speeds. It's like the enormity of the universe weighs down on you as if you were there and contemplating it yourself. Which is one of the special things that Alastair Reynolds does that no one else does.
Not all his books are like that. Some like Posidon's Children do feel much lighter, probably because they concentrate on people rather than events, and they are set closer to home in a galactic sense.
Last edited:
