As you can
infer from the title, or by listening to the podcast, the topic is the Void
trilogy by British author Peter F. Hamilton. Since it is a topic
that is very dear to me, because Hamilton
General
information about the books in the series
The Void
Trilogy is a series by British science fiction author Peter F.
Hamilton and
it is
included in the same universe of the Commonwealth saga, which includes
two other books: “Pandora’s Star” and “Judas Unchained”.
The first book of the trilogy is set chronologically 1200 years after
the last one of these two books. The plot often refers to this saga, but not
reading it does not compromise the understanding of the trilogy.
The series
obviously includes three books, whose titles are:
“The Dreaming Void” (2007)
“The Temporal Void” (2008)
“The Evolutionary Void” (2010)
My reading
of the books date back to 2010, when the first one was released in Italian and
the last one into English. A little because the translation had not
particularly pleased me (mainly because of the astronomical number
of typos) and a little because I didn’t want to wait, after reading “The
Dreaming Void”, I finished reading the trilogy in the original language.
In
addition, the plot, which is very complex and rich of characters, is seamless,
then waiting between a book and the other involves the risk of forgetting
everything or nearly so. There are even important characters that appear
for the first time towards the end of the first book, which ends with a
discrete cliffhanger.
The whole Commonwealth
saga (including the trilogy) is available as ebook on Amazon, like
many other books by this author. Moreover, all Hamilton
Backstory
The story
is set in the thirty-sixth century.
The Void
is a kind of self-contained universe that is at the centre of the galaxy
and is studies for millions of years by aliens called Raiels. They
believe it is a threat to life in the galaxy because of its sporadic phases of
expansion, which devour whole solar systems close to the core of the galaxy.
One of these events occurred several hundred thousand years ago, which prompted
the Raiels to create a class of interstellar spaceships called High Angel
with the aim to rescue sentient civilizations in the event of a new expansion.
The caste of Raiel warriors serves to protect the Void from any intrusion
by other living beings in the galaxy, because they fear that this could trigger
a further expansion.
The Void,
however, isn’t a natural system. Inside it there is a strange universe with
physical laws different from those we know.
In 3589 a
human being, called Inigo, began to dream of a wonderful life
inside the Void. His dreams were transmitted to the rest of humanity through
the Gaia Field, a kind of emotion social network, made possible in enhanced
humans containing a chip in their
brain. This also allows you to store your thoughts and offers a series of
advantages, including real-time connection to the network (Unisphere),
communication, downloading of applications, concepts and so on.
Many humans
are enhanced and live for hundreds of years. Their thoughts, their
essence, consciousness, can be stored in servers, in case they die and a clone
is created in which upload it. In practice, one never dies, so much so
that after a long life humans decide to abandon the physical life to
download their consciousness into the so-called ANA (Advanced Neural
Activity), a kind of huge collector of these virtual beings, where they
continue to live as thought, and which has become the government of the Commonwealth,
in other words, of humanity.
Inigo’s
dreams gather around him a large group of believers, who over time
constitute a religion, the Living Dream and revere the
protagonist of these dreams (Edeard). These believers live in a planet
where they recreated the pattern of life, and even the city (Makkathran 2),
which they saw in Inigo’s dreams. They are, in fact, set on a planet inside the
Void called Querencia.
These
believers are fanatics who want to organize a pilgrimage into the Void to live the life that was shown to them. But
the Raiels and other species (including other humans) fear that their
migration, which they are certain will lead to their death, might lead to a
further expansion of the Void. So they ready to stop this pilgrimage at any
cost.
This is
just the background from which
the story takes place within the trilogy. In reading the plot some religious
and spiritual elements are immediately noticeable, which occur frequently
in space opera, but I intend to analyse them one by one in the next post in this series, and also to show how the author plays with these easily
recognizable themes, and then bring they all to his very rational view of
reality.
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