Excessive Candour
Tote That Barge

To know that it is possible to skip huge hunks of The Dreaming Void and not miss anything precious that may have lodged in the memory cells of those who read every word of every page is good. I did not have the option to skip, but some readers may choose to do so. We have here, after all, a very long book indeed, one whose main function seems to be to prepare us to get into the right mood to begin the story that Peter F. Hamilton promises to unpack in the second and third volumes of the Void Trilogy, which will also be very long.

So it is good to think we can skip those parts of this introductory volume which seem almost rope-a-dope, as though the author were fending off any pretense he was telling a story until he managed to find out what it was; and that we can skip the punch-drunk I-could-have-been-a-contender bits too, where the tale is finally begun but with so exiguous a loquacity that the content drowns in flannel, much of it consisting of name-check infodumps which reintroduce the reader to interchangeable quasi-immortal heroes and heroines and villains from Peter F. Hamilton's previous sequence—Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained—whose overall venue and macro-story the new sequence re-enters a thousand or so years later, in order, eventually, we assume, to trump it.

But that may be unfair, because even the stumblebum bits are fun, because even when he is not actually telling story, Hamilton cannot keep from sounding as though he's telling story; and because it's pretty clear that he does what he does in and to this first volume of his long saga entirely on purpose. I think it's pretty clear that Hamilton conceives of space opera as something distinct from the work of his contemporaries—I could feel the direct impress of A.A. Attanasio, Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Alistair Reynolds, Dan Simmons and others who flickered past too quick for me to name them—from whom he has taken motifs and patterns, and to whom he has donated material in turn, as part of the same conversation, what Damien Broderick (I think the mutual influence Broderick-Hamilton-Broderick is probably minimal) calls the mega-text.

The difference is not, perhaps, quite as simple as knowing how to start (or stop). After the end of the last dance of a book (even if a sequel is due), there is normally a sense that the song has had an ending; that no matter how vast the installment may be, some quasi-operatic cadence cuts the cackle—certainly this is the case if the author knows his business as well as Banks does—on a dime. And that after shutting the book the reader will feel closure, even if it is only pro tem, even if the next volume is ready for the printers. This silence of stopping is not a sensation Hamilton tries very hard to achieve. Indeed it is exactly what he tries not to achieve. In the current volume—The Dreaming Void ends with a genuinely effective slingshot, though significantly its main function is to remind us what we've known to be the case for 500 pages—there is a sense that the story will open again tomorrow for members. What the last page of a book by Hamilton does is close for the night.

Welcome to the club

The Dreaming Void is a novel, in other words, that the reader joins, as one might join a club. We become part of a community of fellow members; we have our favourite seat, we make eye contact with the host for the night (who is pretending to be an ex-boxer), the curtain lifts, and we settle down to watch the next episode of the same show on the same stage within the walls of community. The plot may not be entirely original, and may feature several actors, male and female, reborns or neonates, whom we recognize from previous performances. In Hamilton's universe, these actors (or utterands) are often "re-lifes" (his term for anyone who has died and been recanted—nobody needs to die for good in The Dreaming Void) or stars from previous series (who on re-entering the current volume tend to wait a beat for applause, which we are happy to provide; when Paula Myo, whose origins lie deep in backstory, is finally properly named in The Dreaming Void—she has been lurking in the text from the beginning—you can almost hear the clapping, and when The Cat comes back you can almost see her waiting for us to hiss).

Guy Gavriel Kay (in conversation) has described the experience of reading fantasy novels of this sort as "hanging out" with the cast; in reviewing some of these books, I've used the term "phatic discourse" to describe the community-confirming function they perform. But The Dreaming Void is space opera, where plotting and crescendo effects tend to be much more acutely inflected than they tend to be in dynastic fantasies (though Robert Jordan, quite astonishingly, clearly and responsibly plotted every page of his vast epic; and of course George R.R. Martin means every word he says); and Hamilton knows this very well. He cannot therefore comfortably bask forever with the gang, and it is clear he does not intend to. And perhaps he has no choice: because he is in fact a natural and compulsive storyteller.

It cannot be said, all the same, that the first few hundred pages of The Dreaming Void augur very well, for these pages are sunk so deep into the club house ambience—you can almost hear the audience whispering last orders before the show properly begins—that it seems we're never going to escape, outside the walls, into the new. There is the previous sequence to summarize; there are the intervening 1200 years to ruminate about; there is a new set of characters to introduce (even though half of them are Sarah Bernhardts rescinding their last retirement); and because Hamilton understandably has no wish to upset the apple cart with any false climaxes only 600 pages into his epic, there is lots of action and sex and other curtain-raiser stuff to get us in the mood for the main act. In the end, all the same, Hamilton is simply too energetic not to shake the cart a bit.

Attendijng to the teller of story

The backstory is stupefyingly complex. Crudely, 1200 years earlier, the galaxy survives a vile threat from the alien Prime, and has prospered mightily over the centuries until now, 3589 A.D. Across the galaxy, human cultures have—I'm skipping the numerous exceptions—trifurcated into three broad categories: Advancer civilizations, which are still essentially meat-puppet, though with enhancements; Higher civilizations, which are made up of essentially unkillable cyborged humans whose nano-interfaces with higher technologies (oddly the word nano never appears in the text, unless I missed a vast paragraph or two) make them the effective physical rulers of the human galaxy, rather like the human members of Iain R. Banks' Culture, though without the moral scruples or the governance of Minds; and ANA (or the Advanced Neural Activity system), which is a quasi-physical hive-mind-like hegemony not too many miles from Dan Simmons, and internally rife with squabbles about the route to final transcendence, not too many miles from Stephen Baxter. All three categories seem able to access, via awkwardly named "u-shadow" technologies, various fantasy-like powers, such as farsight, telekinesis, etc. The u-shadow also mediates between human minds and a sort of galaxy-wide Internet, a term I don't think I noticed Hamilton using, and in fact not paid much attention to.

Into this vast loose goulash intrudes a plot, gingerly at first. The eponymous Void, a mysterious not-black hole at the heart of the galaxy, has obsessed the ancient Raiel for a entire Time Abyss of backstory, for good reason: something within or comprising the Void, hugely dangerous, inimical to life, seems almost certainly at the verge of increasing the rate at which it devours the galaxy's star systems for provender. The Raiel are convinced that any attempt to invade the Void will trigger full-blown armaggedon. Unfortunately, a Higher named Inigo has begun to dream enticing dreams of human life within the walls that surround the Void, and a vast sect, the Living Dream, has formed around the "gaiafield"-enabled transmission of these dreams; the Living Dream, which dominates part of human space, is now preparing to transgress the borders of the Void in order to seek nirvana within, or a good life, or something.

We are not really perhaps told quite enough about the allure of these Dreams in this volume; though The Dreaming Void is interpellated by seven chapters recounting the first seven of them, it is hard to work out the challenge they pose to the surrounding assemblages of text. These chapters, which assembled are about as long as a short novel, comprise the YA narrative of young Edeard's childhood and adolescence in a planetary-romance world reminiscent in its uneasy mediaevalism, its ancient sorceries now slumbering, and its colonizing human folk, of Marion Zimmer Bradley or Andre Norton. As befits the adolescence of a hero in this kind of world, Edeard gradually discovers something of the true extent of his psi powers, It is pretty clear that he will come to rule the Sevagram within the Void, and that future volumes of Void will tell us why this pretty simple (though nicely told) YA tale has been able to hypnotize billions of humans. At the moment, all we can say is that an entire YA novel that does not end sinks (rather sweetly) into the seeming shapelessness of the whole. I doubt Hamilton's readers will much mind: It is both a sign of his communal reluctance to end anything, and of his considerable ability to tickle the reader onward through page after page of hanging out, that he is able to make the fragment of Edeard's tale suffice unto the day.

Once we become accustomed to the fact that the Seven Dreams are not going to bring us anywhere close to home in The Dreaming Void, it is possible to bask in the story goulash outside the Void, and in Hamilton's slow stirring of the pot toward the point where he is forced to stop until tomorrow. A lot of this goulash is sex, which Hamilton does really seem to like describing, and which he certainly intends us to enjoy reading about. For this reason, on an obscure planet a long way from the Void, a youngish woman named Araminta, whose role in the big story has yet to come clear, takes up a good deal of the novel undergoing a series of Sex and the City experiences with various partners: Her one-night stand with an obsessive galaxy-spanning entrepreneur and his harem (genetically engineered into positions of submission) may seem a bit rancid; but far more adventurous explorations, with a personality who inhabits simultaneously a series of clones, are both arousing and rather heartwarming. This set of hims soon proposes marriage, and she prepares to say Yes. The problem with Araminta is not the sex lessons—nor the fact that, like the protagonists of Luis Bunuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), who never get to eat a meal, she never gets to shower afterward, no matter how hard she tries—but the fact that, to coin a phrase, there is no climax. The only thing that saves Araminta is Hamilton's eagerness to share. But maybe that's enough. Maybe it's enough that he cannot stop himself from wanting to tell us a story.

This is clearer in the normal novel's worth of space given over to Aaron, a mysterious operative with as many super powers as the plot needs him to have whenever the action accelerates, who very entertainingly destroys everything in his path in his search for the long-disappeared Inigo, either in order to get him to prevent the Pilgrimage of his followers into the Void, or to foment it: We are not yet told. Luckily, everyone Aaron kills can be re-lifed after he has left the shambles he creates on planet after planet, a not-quite-for-real carnage that most of us have learned not only to tolerate in action thrillers, but to rather enjoy. The action sequences themselves are genuinely virtuoso, not only because they are enthrallingly noisy, but because they can actually be followed. Which may be a way of describing the secret of Hamilton's success in promulgating books that seem too big to swallow: that he has learned how to make the reader want to follow him.

It would be unkind to fault The Dreaming Void for never actually starting, because it is exactly not to start that The Dreaming Void is exactly all about accomplishing, and it is Hamilton's peculiar weird mysterious talent to write a book that does not start and does not stop and that makes us want more. When I say mysterious, I refer to the mystery within the puzzle within the enigma of the nature of story itself. Hamilton is a teller of story.