Great North Road - Book Review
Great North Road, by Peter F. Hamilton, is a SF novel. One thing that surprised me in the first few pages, is that while they do have gateways too, it is not a Commonwealth novel. That was a bit of a letdown, but the book made up for it later.
The history of the world is important for anything making sense - a long time ago, someone discovered how to make gateways between points, including several light years. Unlike the Commonwealth, these are harder to aim (which makes more sense, and more importantly, serves the rest of the novel too). Several worlds were colonized, including St. Libra - which makes a great part of the fuel used in several worlds - biooil.
The biggest of those biooil makers is headed by the North family - mostly composed of clones. Now, and this is the important event that starts the story, a North was found murdered in NewCastle - just the city of the St. Libra gateway. And murdered with an weird, never seen weapon, that had also been used in a mass murder of Norths in St. Libra 20 years ago...
The other big tech in this world is smart dust, which is everywhere and serves a bunch of purposes including surveillance, and can maintain a mesh network. People have smart cells implanted (and Hamilton sets up a scene where a character is just getting them installed, just as in his zombie series, so that we can learn exactly how that works), which can access the net, create displays right in your eyes, speakers on your ears and so on, and also have medical monitoring functions. They also seem to have limited AI capabilities.
Pretty cool, uh? Seems a lot more feasible than the nanofibers that just access your brain in the Commonwealth.
I really liked this book, although not as much as some of Hamilton's other series. St. Libra and the alien are nice puzzles, but by the time they are explained formally you understood most of what was happening (and was probably annoyed that none of the characters did). Angela's backstory is fairly interesting, and mixed relatively well with current events.
But I can't help but think that the book could have been a lot shorter than 976 pages and that Hamilton spent way too much time with the murder investigation.
The pre-end resolution is acceptable, although a little abrupt. And it does not pull a Deus Ex Machina (Hamilton did that a few times before). The ending is pretty good.
Overall, recommended, but I can't help wondering if it couldn't have been better.
The history of the world is important for anything making sense - a long time ago, someone discovered how to make gateways between points, including several light years. Unlike the Commonwealth, these are harder to aim (which makes more sense, and more importantly, serves the rest of the novel too). Several worlds were colonized, including St. Libra - which makes a great part of the fuel used in several worlds - biooil.
The biggest of those biooil makers is headed by the North family - mostly composed of clones. Now, and this is the important event that starts the story, a North was found murdered in NewCastle - just the city of the St. Libra gateway. And murdered with an weird, never seen weapon, that had also been used in a mass murder of Norths in St. Libra 20 years ago...
The other big tech in this world is smart dust, which is everywhere and serves a bunch of purposes including surveillance, and can maintain a mesh network. People have smart cells implanted (and Hamilton sets up a scene where a character is just getting them installed, just as in his zombie series, so that we can learn exactly how that works), which can access the net, create displays right in your eyes, speakers on your ears and so on, and also have medical monitoring functions. They also seem to have limited AI capabilities.
Pretty cool, uh? Seems a lot more feasible than the nanofibers that just access your brain in the Commonwealth.
I really liked this book, although not as much as some of Hamilton's other series. St. Libra and the alien are nice puzzles, but by the time they are explained formally you understood most of what was happening (and was probably annoyed that none of the characters did). Angela's backstory is fairly interesting, and mixed relatively well with current events.
But I can't help but think that the book could have been a lot shorter than 976 pages and that Hamilton spent way too much time with the murder investigation.
The pre-end resolution is acceptable, although a little abrupt. And it does not pull a Deus Ex Machina (Hamilton did that a few times before). The ending is pretty good.
Overall, recommended, but I can't help wondering if it couldn't have been better.
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