Sitting Under the Shade of the Tree: Great North Road

When I was last sitting under the shade of the tree enjoying a good book, I expressed my fear that I was becoming a China Miéville fanboy. My stated reason was that excepting one book, every time I finished reading one of his I would "review" (I use sarcastic quotation marks on myself because I would hardly regard these as professional reviews) the book. This trend is apparently continuing with Peter F. Hamilton, as with the exception of Mindstar Rising, the first Greg Mandel novel, I've reviewed every book of his I've read. Continuing today with my "review" of his latest offering, the 1086 page tome Great North Road.

Great North Road is the first standalone Peter F. Hamilton book I've read, as he has a habit of writing trilogies it seems. This particular book is set in 2143, kicking off in the not-so-exotic location of Newcastle-upon-Tyne with discovery of the body of a prominent person. Well, sort of. The body belongs to a member of the North family, a family of all-male clones. The body has been stripped of all features that would permit identification, presenting investigating officer Detective Sidney Hurst with the first of many, many mysterious stumbling blocks.

The one identifying trait is the murder weapon/method, which is the same as a murder on the exotic planet of St Libra (linked to Newcastle by a trans-spatial gateway permitting instantaneous travel from one planet to the next) that occurred in 2121. Where the victims were Bartram North, patriarch of one of the three branches of the North family. The second hitch...Angela Tramelo, one of Bartram North's "girlfriends" who survived the massacre on St Libra, was convicted of the crime and has been languishing in Holloway prison all the while.

Things rapidly spiral out of control from there - all through her trial, Tramelo had insisted that she didn't murder Bartram or his household...an alien did. With the implication that this "alien" was involved in a fresh murder in 2143, the Human Defence Alliance descends on the investigation. From there, both Sidney Hurst and Angela Tramelo are dragged into the HDA's hunt for the truth - is there another alien race out to get humanity, or did Tramelo have an accomplice on St Libra?

Now to run away from the plot so I don't post any spoilers and talk about...well, pretty much any damn thing. We'll start with the brief verdict - I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are some damn compelling characters, from the pretty uncomplicated, down-to-earth but incredibly shrewd Detective Sidney Hurst to the incredibly complicated Angela Tramelo. Sprinkled in with the main characters I've mentioned before are some pretty neat supporting characters - HDA officer Colonel Vance Elston, who is convinced Tramelo is hiding the truth behind the events on St Libra, Sidney Hurst's through-and-through Geordie partner Detective Ian Lanagin and the occasional perspective character of surf-shop owner Saul Howard. I could go on, but I might say too much.

So moving over to one of my other favourite topics - setting. I mentioned the gateway concept briefly. In this particular future, Earth is connected to a whole ton of planets by these gateways. We get to "see" a couple of them, but by and large our primary settings are Earth and St Libra. And St Libra is fascinating planet - it has absolutely no indigenous animal life and has what is called "zebra" botany, which are plants that produce both carbon dioxide AND oxygen, making the uninhabited planet a perfectly habitable tropical jungle paradise. St Libra is, if memory serves, slightly bigger than Earth and the star it orbits is younger than our own. All these elements combine to make a strange, unpredictable tropical world...that even has its own rings, akin to those of Saturn's. Though the rocks from these rings have a nasty habit of falling through the atmosphere in an area called "The Fall Zone". But apart from that, the presence of the rings sounds awesome. Especially as St Libra doesn't have any moons. Which is kind of sad. No planet should be without a moon.

I feel should take a moment to talk about the actual writing. You know, style, flow, stuff like that. Now Hamilton is defined, I believe, as Hard Science-Fiction. That means lots of amazing technology (epitomised in Great North Road by the trans-spatial gateways and a funky load of tech called smartcells) and good chunks of description about...well, planets, spaceships, space stations, things like that. And it doesn't detract from a quite gripping narrative. I wouldn't say it's nail-biting, but...it gnaws at you. All those little hints and clues, chewing away at the back of your brain, calling you back to the book so you can find out just what the frak is actually going on. In my eyes, just as good as a book you can't put down. But like I say, fair amounts of description of tech, people and locations. Which is also good, because you get a pretty damn good picture of this twenty-second century world Hamilton has created.

I've reached the point of babbling entropy, so I'm going to wrap things up. Great North Road was pretty damn good, a thoroughly enjoyable yarn. Well worth picking up and devoting a good chunk of time to sitting under that tree and reading it.

Curled Up Next to the Fire: The Nano Flower

As usual, there's been a slightly lengthy period of silence between my last bout of squeeing (my gushings on the legend that is Peter V. Brett), but it can be argued that this entry is very tangentially linked to that event. For this is, as the title suggests, the literary segment. And this entry in the literary segment concerns the third book in the Greg Mandel Series, authored by Peter F. Hamilton. In addition to sharing the same first name, I had the pleasure to meet both men at the same bookshop.

Anyway, enough random blabbering. Time to get on with the literary critique babbling.

I have previously rambled about the Greg Mandel Series here, talking about the second book, A Quantum Murder. Given that A Quantum Murder took place not too long after the first instalment, Mindstar Rising, I was expecting a similar length of time between the second and third books. To my pleasant surprise, The Nano Flower takes place some seventeen years after the events of A Quantum Murder, placing it circa 2061.

So, some in-universe context. Julia Evans is no longer a tempestuous yet shrewd teenager at the helm of one of the largest companies on the planet. She is a shrewd, level-headed mother of two, whose husband mysteriously disappeared eight months previously. Greg Mandel has long since retired from the private detective game and has four kids of his own, with number five on the way. Now a humble orange farmer, he and his wife Eleanor are quite happy to stay out of Julia's complicated world of corporate espionage.

Until Julia's errant husband manages to have a strange flower delivered to his wife. In the space of one strange delivery, Greg finds himself dragged back into the world he had hoped to have left behind.

Classic premise for the trilogy finale, eh? The quest to follow the breadcrumbs left by Julia's husband bring the old team back together for one last glorious fling, in which they chase down not only the errant husband, but also an astounding new technology that could change the face of humanity's future.

By far, The Nano Flower has the largest scale of all the Greg Mandel novels. It finds our erstwhile hero jetting around the world and even out of this world, to the Crown Colony of New London - an asteroid painstakingly placed in Earth's orbit by Julia's company, Event Horizon. And compared to the previous two books, The Nano Flower is a lot grander in scope. It knows it's the finale and it's pulling out all the stops. For one thing, tekmercs. It's a phrase that had been bandied about since Mindstar Rising and I'll be brutally honest, it had never been fully explained to my satisfaction until the third book, when one of the main characters, Suzi (a friend of Greg Mandel's from his years fighting PSP oppression in Peterborough), turns out to be a tekmerc. Through her and her encounters with rival tekmercs, we finally get a neatly rounded picture of who these people are and what they do.

We also get to see Greg pull off a lot more stunts with his psi abilities. At least I'm fairly certain we were never introduced to the use of eidolonics in Mindstar Rising. Either way, The Nano Flower was the big finish. Even if I hadn't known it was the last of the Greg Mandels, even if I had read at the time of its first release in 1995 (when I was six and so could not have had any hope of grasping a single one of the novel's concepts), the feel of it screams the last hoorah before the curtain drops. And it's a very enjoyable and quite satisfying end to the series. There's no obvious doors being left open, it feels pretty much solidly, 100% resolved. In part this is also reflected by my pet favourite subject of novels, setting. The United Kingdom of the Greg Mandel Series is a broken tropical country, recovering from the brutality of a classically misguided socialist government. And now, circa 2061, it feels more...together. Even with a political backdrop of Welsh secessionism, it feels that Great Britain has adjusted to the effects of the Warming. They've recovered from the PSP and they're dealing with the fact that they're a tropical country. As well as being the big finish, The Nano Flower leaves the reader with the distinct impression that this future Britain, once so battered and fractured, is a whole nation again. And as a wise maiden said in the movie A Knight's Tale, all things should end with hope.

So there we have it. Final verdict summation - The Nano Flower is an enjoyable and satisfying, albeit on occasion a tad outlandish, conclusion to the Greg Mandel Series. The next Peter F. Hamilton offerings in my reading list are Great North Road and The Reality Dysfunction. Two daunting looking tomes. Might take me a good few months to get through them. You'll all just have to stay tuned, dear readers.

Curled Up Next to the Fire: A Quantum Murder

It's that old temporal mechanics trick again. It's been a little while since I've done my little "literary" segment of the blog. Such a little while, in fact, that seasons have changed and the title has come full circle from spring/summer's "Sitting Under the Shade of the Tree" to autumn/winter's "Curled Up Next to the Fire". I mean it is rather a tad chilly down here. If I had a fire and the time to relax curled up next to it, I would. But alas and begone with these lamentations, I have a book to talk about.

Today I'm going to babble about A Quantum Murder by British sci-fi author Peter F. Hamilton. First, a tiny bit of rambling context.

I've been trying to expand my sci-fi reading horizons for a good while now. I'll be honest, I watch far more sci-fi than I read. The journey began in 2007, as I was going to university, when I obtained William Gibson's irrefutably genius debut novel, Neuromancer. Since then, the road has been slow going, winding, but in the last year or two, I've been making far more steady progress. And in all the hours (cumulative, not continuous) I've spent in the little sci-fi section in the local Waterstone's (I refuse to adhere to their new spelling/punctuation thing, it's stupid), my eyes eventually came to continually rest upon the second book in the Greg Mandel Series and its intriguing title, A Quantum Murder.

Now I'm a little bit on the borderline of being OCD. I've reached a point where I can't read books in a series out of sync, not without good reason. So when I picked up A Quantum Murder, read the enticing blurb on the back then caught the part that said "Volume Two", I cursed and had to put it down. Luckily volume one, Mindstar Rising, was right next to it.

In classic whimsical style, I didn't blog about Mindstar Rising, though it was a very enjoyable book. So it gets this honourable mention before I blab on about A Quantum Murder.

Okay, so we're down with rambling context. Time for the relevant context.

From dates given in A Quantum Murder, I've surmised that the book is set around 2044, in a slightly broken England. It's decades since an event called the Warming caused sea levels to rise and changed not only coastline of Britain, but the entire climate as well. It's now a tropical paradise...or would be if the entire country wasn't emerging from a decade of communist rule under the People's Socialist Party (PSP), who aren't the novel's villains but their legacy and villainy pervade throughout.

The novel focuses on the murder of one Doctor Edward Kitchener, a renowned "quantum cosmologist" and general eccentric physics genius. It's one of those impossible murders - the security at his remote lab facility was too great for any of his potential enemies/rivals to get in. Which leaves his six resident students as the only likely suspects.

One of Kitchener's former students, a prominent scientist for British megacorporation Event Horizon, pulls some strings (namely runs to his boss, teenage billionaire Julia Evans) and Greg Mandel is brought in as a consultant. Greg is an empath - courtesy of a funky do-da called a neurohormone gland put into his head by the British Army, he is able to sense people's emotions. Not quite psychic but close enough to that he's able to sense whether or not any of the students have committed the murder.

Now it's probably been mentioned that I like superpowers and superpower related stuff. So to find a sci-fi novel set in Britain with a psychic protagonist...I was intrigued. After reading and thoroughly enjoying Mindstar Rising, I was looking forward to A Quantum Murder and I wasn't disappointed. A Quantum Murder was on a slightly smaller scale than Mindstar Rising, less jetting around and all, but there was plenty of psychic powers, intrigue and action to keep me occupied. But one of the most fascinating parts for me is England itself, the way Peter F. Hamilton manages to make this mundane country I live in sound so exotic and broken. It's been noted before when I've blabbed on about China Miéville and William Gibson, I have this tendency to get wrapped up in the setting. When a writer can create an incredible atmosphere and sense of place, unique even if I've been there and know exactly what it's all about, well, that's something a little bit special to me. Hamilton's 2040s broken (not dystopian, not anymore anyway) England is an engrossing place. Never has Peterborough (headquarters of Event Horizon and practically the focal point for England's fledgling economy) sounded so...well, important. It's never felt really...on the map for me (sorry, Peterborough. Nothing personal).

In some form of conclusion, I really enjoyed A Quantum Murder. There's one more novel in the Greg Mandel Series - The Nano Flower. Depending on how that ends, I might be sad that there aren't any more Greg Mandel novels. I've been rather enjoying them.

Right, time to stoke the fire and get reading so there can be a next time...