Despite disliking the title of this book - as it is way to close to Brin's "Startide Rising" - and thinking that the opening was weak (especially the "sharp scintillations slashing" triple enumerated alliteration in the first line), I found that I enjoyed it. After a shaky start, Hamilton manages to spin an interesting story. Set in the near future, the world his protagonist, Greg Mandel, lives in is one afflicted by climate change and political warfare. Hamliton manages to pump out numerous dry and wet tech ideas as well as including some sociological ones.

Some of the characterization is a little weak and, in my opinion, the balance between filling in too little detail on the "universe" the story is set in and too much is off a few times. (I found myself skipping parts of paragraphs here and there which, to be fair, was probably as much to get back to the gripping action as to skip tedious excessive descriptions of the countryside.) That said, this action-detective story is worth reading as it still manages to entertain and stimulate the imagination.

This was Hamilton's debut novel. In his later works, especially in "The Reality Dysfunction" Hamilton improves on his characterization without loosing the ability keep the action and ideas flowing...starting with his first book will only whet your appetite for Hamilton's writing.

Creating an almost foreign world, populating it with interesting characters, plotting a tight thriller AND setting it in the near future is no mean feat but Hamilton does it brilliantly with "Mindstar Rising".

The world-weary ex soldier Greg Mandel is an excellent blend of self composed "done it all" attitude and state of the art technologist. Splash in some very human traits (like a need for revenge, neglect of friends and using your rare talent to advantage in the sack) and you have a book that sucks you in from the first.

To my mind the best of the three Mandel stories (compare to "A Quantum Murder" which was good and "The Nano Flower" which is insanely far fetched when you actually stop to think about things and definately tighter than the last Hamilton I read, "Fallen Dragon" (which I think shows signs of writers fatigue...God knows where the drive comes from to deliver another 600 pages after The Night's Dawn Trilogy but there you are)).

Mindstar rising was the first Peter Hamilton book I read - but not for long. As soon as I had got past the first couple of chapters of this book, I went out & bought the rest of the trilogy ('A Quantum Murder' and 'The Nano Flower'). All concern a 21st Century dramatically changed both Politically and Environmentally. The main protagonist is Greg Mandell, a veteran of the second Gulf war, who has some enhanced psychic ability - due to experimental surgery performed on him & others who tested 'positive' for the basic capability. Due to this ability (and the fact that he has become a private detective), he gets pulled into a world of high-powered politics & intrigue, with the action mainly taking place in the Rutland area of England. If you haven't read any of his books, this is good one to start with; but don't forget to buy the rest of the trilogy. The book is handled well, with the characters being believable, & having a depth to them that you will find in all his books.

Any complaints? Ony one - that I hadn't read it sooner. This trilogy is one I keep coming back to (8 times so far), and has become one of my firm favourites. Saying that.....which bookcase did I put them? I think I'll start them again, ta ta.

Book 3 of this series, and I'm still reading. But, even if there were more, I'm fairly certain I would have stopped here.
The Nano Flower had great promise. Interesting, if somewhat far-fetched, plot, and several threads running through to hold it all together.
But by the end, I was shaking my head. What happened?
The end was disappointing, and not really worth waiting for. All the suspense about the alien, and when it finally arrived.... Well, it was just sad. So much could have been done with all of the different parts of the end of this book.... But nothing was, really.
As it went along, the story got thinner and thinner. The characters weren't bad, but more could have been done with them.
And the 14, 15 year gap between this one and the last... My question is, why? To show that the characters have grown, and evolved? What's the point if you don't have any idea what happened to them during that time?
And judging by what I read, a few important things happened then that I would have liked explained. I'll give one example. Royan. Last we saw of him, well, he was in bad shape. Suddenly in this book, he's married to Julia, and has children, and has been missing for 8 months. Granted, it's almost explained later, but not well. I don't know about most people, but I was very curious as to how exactly Royan ended up where he is now.
Basically, it was just disappointing to me all the way around.
It could have been great.....But it wasn't.

I am new to Peter Hamilton's writing and The Nano Flower is the first of his novels that I have read. I used to be an avid SF reader in the 60s and 70s but found progressively fewer new writers appealed to me. I guess that I make a rather demanding audience but, I am happy to report, Peter Hamilton may well make the grade with me.

Other reviewers make a number of valid points about the book and I don't intend to repeat them save to say that I agree it is let down by a rather limp ending. Hamilton doesn't always play to his strengths or, indeed, recognise a strong character when he creates one. Although I am new to the series I can already see that Hamilton's chief protagonists are often his most wooden creations - I found Greg Mandel and Julia Evans unsatisfying as characters. Perhaps I have done Mr Hamilton a disservice and they were better developed in early books.

On the other hand there are a number of characters who fleetingly come to life - even though they are later discarded by the author. Baronsky is sufficiently fleshed out to be intriguing and, until her liberation from the airship, Charlotte Fielder is also very promising.

The real pleasure of the book is the imaginative development of technology and predictions of future business and political structures. Hamilton has a good mix of familiar global names diversifying into new, but convincing, business lines and minor brands of today emerging as global players. There are also a number of sly and knowing political and regional developments that will amuse British readers but may go unnoticed by others.

All in all I enjoyed this book and look forward to reading other by the author.

In this book, the last in the trilogy, we find Greg Mandell retired from being a private detective for a number of years; but being called back to 'duty' by Julia Evans, to find her missing husband. I could sympathise with Greg, and his feeling that he was getting too old for this type of work, especially when things starts getting quite physical.

Greg's psychic talent doesn't play quite as much part in this book, and I think we get to see a bit more of his human side (that doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean).

There are a lot of strands to the story, which are brought together well - a good testing ground for the methods he used in writing 'The Reality Dysfunction'.

I have to say that, while I really enjoyed the book, I found the ending to be almost unfinished; as if, once he had all the strands in one hand, neatly coming together after encirling the package - and most of them tied off - he didn't quite know how to finish the knot, and ended up with a slightly ungainly 'granny' knot.

I'd be interested to know if this was caused by space constraints; or had he something else in mind, that didn't work out the way he wanted.

Another great collection of Sci-Fi Novels, a collection of Six stories that join into one big story... All of them have separate storylines which all coincide towards the end.

A great read for anyone on holiday and nothing much to do... Reads easily even if it is a bit on the childish side most of the time, a great read for kids getting into Sci-Fi and I certainly enjoyed it...

A bit of a change from Asimov ;Þ

I loved this series. I really did. It's going to go down in my lists as one of the best Space Opera series I've read (comparisons of Peter Hamilton to Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov are very much deserved, in my opinion). This series is very intricate, with lots and lots of memorable characters and locations, large interstellar mysteries, alien races (both malevolent and benign), and plenty of action and warfare.

The thing I think I enjoyed most about this series was the characters that you learn so much about, and about whom you really learn to care by the end of the story. Also, the horror present in parts of this story is very much akin to what you'd read in stories by HP Lovecraft or Brian Lumley (witness what happens to Dariat and his companions and you'll get a taste of what true hopelessness and desperation feel like).

This series is so good, there isn't enough space here to talk about all the things I like about it. It's truly epic in scope, and comes to a very satisfactory conclusion. I especially enjoyed watching Quinn Dexter finally get what was coming to him.

My only reason for removing one star from this final book is due to the quick ending to the book. Humanity is truly at a point of final desperation, and it really appears that nothing is going to be able to stop the dead from taking over the universe. The solution to this dilemma comes literally in the last 20 pages of the book. It's the result of a quest that Joshua and his crew have been on for a long time, even getting involved in the civil war of a newly-discovered alien race in the process. Joshua is seeking an alien artifact with 'God power', and is hoping that this artifact can help them. However, when Joshua finds this artifact, rather than finding a solution that can help them solve their own problem, the artifact literally solves the problem for all of humanity in the matter of just a few pages. After all the work (mostly enjoyable) I had gone through reading all 6 of these books, it was a bit of a letdown to have things solved so completely and so quickly by an alien entity with all the answers.

But this is a minor criticism. Peter Hamilton has done something that not many authors even attempt, and even fewer ever do successfully. He's created a very detailed and interesting universe with lots of memorable characters and settings that's a lot of overall fun to read. If the ending is a bit hurried, it's at worst only a minor disappointment that's definitely overshadowed by the scope and greatness of this series.

It's going to be hard talking about this without revealing plot points but I'm going to do my best. If you're reading this you're either reading because you want to see if someone agreed with your opinion or you're curious about the series and want to see if it's worth it. The former folks I can't do anything about but to the latter I can definitely say it's worth the trip. The last book in the series mostly wraps up the myriad of major plots, granted they converge in a way never thought possible but at the same time it was fairly exciting how they all suddenly merged. The action is as rapid as ever and Hamilton deftly keeps things moving to the point where you're literally flipping through pages because the pace is just that rapid. The characters are . . . well, toward the end they start falling into the traps of their own stereotypes, Quinn Dexter was never the most three dimensional of people but he gets tiresomely predictable as the book winds to a close, while even the good characters tend to start wallowing in their own goodness. Still it's a classic good versus evil fight with some wacky philosophy thrown in and generally that requires its character to be living embodiments of goodness or vile evil, Hamilton normally handles it well but sometimes you just want to roll your eyes. The ending isn't as much abrupt as really "deux es machina" but if you can figure out a way to wrap all that up without writing an entirely new book, I'd like to see folks try. It wasn't the perfect ending that I was hoping for but at the same time it didn't ruin the book for me like others are claiming. All in all the entire series is a very satisfying experience, it's sort of sad to finish it since if you've been following this since the beginning it's been nearly three years and over three thousand pages, this people good or bad start to become sort of like part of your family. Hamilton should be praised for making one of the best future histories to come along for a long time, it's detailed and more importantly it's a place (well before that whole possession thing) that I wouldn't mind living in, full of action and adventure and political intrigue, he could theoretically mine the setting for stories for years. I don't think since Larry Niven's Known Space series have we seen that. Is the series perfect? No, it's not, but there isn't any single problem that I could see that made the books less worthy or anything that made want to stop reading. There was something for everyone here and what we got was one of the greatest SF epics of the last ten or so years that raised a bunch of interesting concepts (and distilled a bunch more, Hamilton wasn't utterly original but it's what you do with the concepts that counts), was vastly entertaining and entirely readable (except when you skip a few years in between reading, don't make that mistake) and it's a series who's reputation will only grow in the years to come.

Peter Hamilton created a universe filled with wonders, such as the Edenist culture. Throughout every word of this series, I was struck by the wonderful job he did in making the outgrowth of our society today work in painting a realistic picture of our culture in several hundred years.

The technology fit well with the view he painted. It was neither too wondrous nor too annoying. Everything he wrote fit within his sense of our future history.

This book finally wraps up the entire series, revealing previous hidden secrets that tantalized you throughout the earlier books.

The ending, which many people appear to rant about, wrapped up the series quite well in my opinion. Not to spoil the book, but it wrapped up the possession problem in the only way that really could have solved it in any respectable time or way. It also leaves the struggle for humanity's resolution of the problem of the beyond wide open.

Humanity must still deal with the fact that when they die they will enter the beyond. People throughout the human race must still be taught to believe in themselves. What happened to all of the human stars is a thing of wonder, and still makes me smile.

All in all, this is a wonderful series, that is concluded in a wonderful way. It makes me respect Peter Hamilton as much as I respect many other Sci-Fi gods.

Well, here we have the sequel to Mindstar Rising. It has many of the same characters, bringing some old favorites back for a second book.
Overall, this book is 3 stars. Some elements were better than others, obviously. The characters were good, though Eleanor still seems to have no personallity whatsoever. The plot was inplausible, at best, and hard to believe. The writing style was still very interesting, and is, in fact, the only reason that I finished this book at all.
A murder mystery set in future England, with not one but several odd twists. Not good twists really, nor believable, but not too farfetched, if you have a very, very open mind. (I think I'll leave it at that.)
One of the best things about this book though was the fact that the author obviously took some pains to follow semi-known physics, and tried not to bend the laws of the universe too far. Also, even though these things play a major part in the story, the aren't the dominating feature. So, for those of you not interested in theoretical quantum physics, or cosmology, this book won't bore you to tears.
All in all, it flowed (to me at least) better than Mindstar Rising, even if the storyline was a little thin in several places.
I also found the discription of the inside of an insane seriel killer's mind quite interesting; it really makes you wonder.
So, if you liked the first book, chances are that this one will appeal to you as well.

This author writes a well paced book. If you like the idea of
Gland Psychics, Hardliners (body guards) and Cyber
technology, this one is fun.
Good characterisation and a story wonderful!! More speculative SciFi please.

Some years after the events portrayed in Mindstar Rising, Greg Mandell finds himself being called in to help Julia Evans solve the mystery of the murder of a scientist who was doing some work for her company - Things start to get 'interesting' very quickly - in the sense of the Chinese Curse, that is.

Again set in the Rutland area of England, Greg has now married the girl he met in the first book & that adds its own complications (read the book to find out more on that); with psychic abilities also playing a large part in this book, including a very nice twist to 'solving' the murder.

These books always get me thinking, the events are set in the near future, with environmental & political upheavals which are all too possible. A very good read.

If you haven't read 'Mindstar Rising'(the first book), don't worry - this book stands on its own, but you will benefit if you read 'Mindstar' first.

Better still, read the trilogy, you won't regret it.

This series is very interesting, engrossing, and full of interesting characters, technology, and philosopies, all set in a very plausible future for humankind only 700 years off.

This book is very similar in structure to Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy, in the large number of overlapping story lines going on. Unfortunately, after the long hiatus from the preceeding four books in the series (technically, he calls them two books in two volumes each) coming back to it was a little challenging. Fortunately, though, he includes a full six page cast of characters in the front of the book, as well as a "timeline" in the rear, which helped during the first 50-100 pages until the rest came back to me.

Another very good book set in the same universe is "A Second Chance at Eden." This is a book of short stories, and was a very enjoyable read while waiting for this book to be published.

As with his other books, don't expect to put this down until you finish it - and it will take a while, with his detailed story, engrossing style, and 600+ pages of goodness.

When I read the other books in this series I thought that Peter Hamilton could go no further. This book proved me wrong. Despite parts that are a bit too trite for the overall theme (Al Capone? Give me a break) this book was fanntastic. All the way through I was thinking, 'there is no way that this can be ended satisfactorily'. With a hundred pages to go and still six or seven highly disparate story threads going on I was completely expecting a massive let down. This did not come. This book wraps up the entire trilogy brilliantly and I can only say, read it and see.

I have read this entire series. I have deeply enjoyed each installment. It is apparent, from the writing, that the author is weaving a multitude of social, moral, and technological issues into a wonderfully imaginative and thought provoking series. Each book is satisfying and the finale does not disappoint. I am eagerly awaiting more of Mr. Banks works!

I was sorely disapointed with this book. I was hoping for the majority of it to be background and detail that wasn't covered in the series. Unfortunately, other than some "physical data" on many of the star systems, a few in depth histories and one or two other tidbits, most of the information in here is directly from the trilogy, just repackaged. This book was a waste of my money.

The Confederation Handbook is a companion volume to Hamilton's massive "Night's Dawn Trilogy", which was a trilogy in Britain, but not in the USA. It lays out the history and technology of the major cultures, discusses the planets on which the action of the trilogy occurs, and fills in a little background information.
Why is it a book of spoilers? Much of Night's Dawn consists of going through a long series of adventures to find out the quirks of Hamilton's galaxy. It is the wealth and appeal of his background, and the daring of his conceit- scifi that overtly tackles all the issues usually left to religion-- that make "Night's Dawn" so popular. With this book you get in neat summary the information that would otherwise require you to read thousands of pages of the trilogy itself. Indeed, if you read the first volume of "Reality Dysfunction" and would like to know where the story goes, you have only to read this book, skip the next four and a half volumes, and read the last 100 pages of "Naked God", and you will have the plot. So this book can be considered the Cliff Notes version of "Night's Dawn". Readers who have read and learned all the information provided in the trilogy will find little new here. Since I had read the six volumes at different times, there were gaps in my knowledge, and this book was wonderful for filling those (somehow, I missed the part where he explained the cause of the reality dysfunction itself). So I enjoyed and profited from this Handbook. Please note that the one thing omitted from the "Handbook" is the Deus ex Machina ending of "The Naked God"; readers seeking more information about that phenomenon will be disappointed.
Fans of "Night's Dawn" might want to buy this book as a reference work. It has handy sections on Voidhawk breeding, etc.
Now you can make your own decision.

Here is one book that I am divided on. On the one hand, I can hardly claim to be disappointed since the book delivers exactly what is described. On the other hand, I am a little disappointed due to the nature of the book itself. The first thing to understand is that this is not a book of stories revolving around the "Night's Dawn" trilogy and its Future History. Rather this is basically a compendium of the people, technology, cultures, etc. of that Future History in a condensed format. That being said, all of this is available in the trilogy itself somewhere. It is not in the condensed format, granted, but it is in there. That, of course, is to be expected. However, there is really nothing extra that makes this book all that compelling of a buy. I am sure there are a few extra details here and the degree of satisfaction you will feel with those few extra details will depend entirely upon just how deeply you want to get into the Future History.

If you are a person that has trouble getting into "space opera" type stories where there are many characters, cultures, and technologies, this book might help you make sense of it all beforehand rather than learning it piece-meal via reading through the "Night's Dawn" trilogy of books. However, if you are not that sort of person my guess is you will feel that you wasted your money. (Note: I am not saying you will feel cheated. As I said, the book gives what it promises.) I gave this three stars because it is an excellent compendium to the "Night's Dawn" trilogy but I kept the last two stars simply because nothing extra was really added for those fans who might have wanted a little more. If I had to make recommendations, I would say avoid this one and read the trilogy or "A Second Chance at Eden" (which is a collection of short stories and novellas dealing with the Future History).