at least for the moment...
I've been reading this monumental piece by Peter F Hamilton, second part of the Commonwealth saga. I haven't finished it yet, and I'll probably get to the last page within one week or so, but the problem is that it's getting boring...
I fell however that I can already draw a judgement about the whole saga. Unless the next hundred pages get a decise improvement, my answer is that it sucks. And even if they were, i am afraid it may be too late. The real problems are not with the plot, but with the background. I mean, I can suspend my unbelief only for a certain amount... Ok we have a world-scene very different from what we saw in the confederation books. In the confederation, starships were connecting the various planets. In this one, it is trains through wormholes (nice victorian touch, I'd expect nothing less froma british author). In both cases, fancy technologies allow a more or less unchanged humanity to get along reasonably well... but this is where the good parallels end. And everything goes awry in the Commonwealth.
In the confederation, starships are common place, but what really defines the unioverse are Edenists. Transhumans which share a sort of multiple personality through the 'affinity' bond, genetically spliced within them before birth.
They are masters of genetic engineering, at the point in which their spaceships are living and sentient beings. But even so, the human side shows up in the fact that some of them are renegades, and the technologies they rely on have been pirated more than once. It's only an ethical problem to keep the rest of humanity from embracing them.
Now, confront this with the Commonwealth, where the defining point is the WornHole technology. Dear Good peter would like us to believe that, once the demon is out of the bottle, no government has tried to replicate the thing to suit its own agenda. Instead, everybody is queueing ordinately to the two guys who seemingly engineered the first one, paying their dues to help them build an unrivalled commercial empire.
More than this, another so called 'dinasty' possess monopoly on the other important technology, force fields. and none of these two are trying to gut each other by intruding in the other's turf. ah! I'm sorry, but that's unbelievable... I just can't believe that, after three hundred years, the technology isn't still commonplace. I mean, that's three hundred years. Just look at what happened with lasers, once they went public!!! they're commonplace after only thirty years.
and in three hundred years, control over WHs has been so strict that only one of them has been used for an illegal heist? ah! again, this is just wishful thinking. It is blatantly avoiding to look at gibson's first law of technology, which asserts: "The streets will find its uses". meaning that every technology is applied by normal people and criminals alike in ways unforeseen by their inventors... no matter how hard the writer try to set up the scene in order to avoid this. and replicating a three hundred years old tech should be easy enough for the syndicates, which are still seemingly strong in the commonwealth...
Ph!
Other than that, the characters just do not have the verve of the Confederation people. Kime is may be the most human, the ex pilot of the first (and last) Mars Space mission, turned enterprise captain when its mission is interrupted by the two geniuses with a hand-made spacesuit and their newly fangled wormhole...
The SI, the multi-conscoiusness which results from the fusion of the first AI and many other human minds thereafter, is extremely under-utilised in the plot, yt it would seem that it has big stakes on human survivals. After all, its physical location is still somewhere in CW space. Plus, it's made of human minds, after all. The justification given for itssympathetyc neutrality is good enough, but still, I'd expect them to pull their own weight in the battle. Anyway I believe that it could be safely assumed that for weapons inventiveness the SI may not be able to match the trillion of humans minds, albeit separate.
The only thing I'd save is the enemy, MorningLightMountain. Incredibly inhuman, and really alien in its behaviour. But even there, I seriously doubt that a life form would be able to exterminate everything in his own path, and keep itself clear of parasites... I mean, think of it: a planetary intelligence, a single species, with a very high biological uniformity, uninclined from what we read to genetically engineer itself... why didn't human try to use bio-weapons, of which they're masters, against it? enough for the moment. I'll continue ranting about it later...
