The Male Void: a review of Peter F. Hamilton's "The Dreaming Void"
The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Reading "The Dreaming Void" was akin to watching an epic sci-fi film scripted by a horny male teenager who'd never read anything other than sci-fi.
Peter F. Hamilton has an impressive imagination and in this novel he paints an awe-inspiring future: vast civilisations trading with each other, a cyber world where people can upload themselves if they are fed up with their material bodies, and my favourite: the possibility of cloning oneself as many times as possible and being able to exist in all bodies at the same time.
The problem is that "The Dreaming Void" is quite flat when it comes to its characterisation. This future is a scientific one untouched by any art outside of standard sci-fi troupes, and this reflects in its two dimensional characters. Beautiful and engaging descriptions are often brought down by incredibly cliched or poor dialogue. This makes it seem as if most characters are interchangeable.
What's worse, "The Dreaming Void" is actually not the first of a trilogy, as the book cover promises, but the third in a cycle of five novels. So, for example, a dangerous woman shows up half way through the story who was apparently killed in one of the first two books. The reader is expected to know who she is and the importance of her return, but if you haven't read the first two books, as was my case, you feel slightly lost.
By coincidence, while I was reading this novel, I heard about the Bechdel Test, named for the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who came up with it with her friend Liz Wallace for the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" in 1985. According to Wikipedia, the "Bechdel test" asks if a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Though half of the protagonists are female in "The Dreaming Void" I couldn't spot any that didn't spend her time talking or worrying about the men in their lives, or who wasn't there solely for a sex scene.
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