I am back with installment two of our collective journey through the strange abyss that is Peter F. Hamilton’s The Night’s Dawn Trilogy. If you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, the staff of QTL is doing a collective read and discussion of this iconic sci-fi trilogy. However, the discussions have a ton of spoilers for the books, so as the reader who is the most on top of his schedule I am also writing some reviews of the books. Today I will be talking about book two, The Neutronium Alchemist. You can find the spoiler-free review of book one here and the group discussion of book one here.
So long story short, The Neutronium Alchemist is reallllllly good. It’s superior in almost every single way to book one, The Reality Dysfunction, and is probably one of my favorite science fiction books. The plot is a little hard to talk about without spoilers, but the story, in brief, is a natural continuation of the events that started in book one. The aforementioned spirit plague has started consuming entire planets, but the collective of humanity now understands the threat that they are facing and are starting to get organized around the threat. Despite everything I loved about The Reality Dysfunction, one of its few major misses was the fact that the overarching “spirit plague” plotline felt divorced from the independent stories we were reading through the various characters. Conversely, The Neutronium Alchemist is almost entirely a reactionary piece cataloging how humanity is facing this new massive threat. Through this narrative, Hamilton fleshes out the higher level plot in ways that were severely lacking in book one as well as showcases his incredible ability to explore how a collective species would react to rapid large scale changes in their lives. In my opinion, The Neutronium Alchemist is an anthropological wet dream.
Additionally, the characters grow both in depth and in cast size. There are some very satisfying development arcs with existing characters, as well as a much more even division of POVs across Hamilton’s universe. I mentioned that there felt like there was some potential lurking sexist writing in the first book, and while The Neutronium Alchemist doesn’t do much to justify the small problematic parts of book one there also aren’t any additional offenses that I noticed. The second book seems to do a much better job elevating female POVs and putting them center stage. The worldbuilding is a step more coherent, with Hamilton moving from describing a number of individual planets to painting a picture of a large galactic human empire. The second book does a much better job characterizing humanity as a whole and showing the tensions and interactions between the various sects of human culture.
All in all, if you enjoyed The Reality Dysfunction – you are really going to like The Neutronium Alchemist. If you managed to finish TRD but didn’t know if you wanted to continue, I recommend that you do. Book two has kept everything that was good about Hamilton’s debut novel and improved almost every place it fell short. Despite being over 1300 pages I tore through TNA and could not put it down. Now we will just have to see if my fellow site members agree with me.
Rating: The Neutronium Alchemist – 10/10
-Andrew
Thanks for sharing!
I added The Neutronium Alchemist to my reading queue (after it had been gathering virtual dust in my “next” folder for some years) on the strength of your comments about the first volume and the renewed curiosity for the story that came from your review. Hopefully I will get there soon… 🙂