Review of The Reality Dysfunction (1996)

Text

Peter F. Hamilton (writer).

Read in 2024.

This book is a space opera, both in a general sense and in the specific way that it superimposes high technology on the epic fantasy genre. The author has at least a basic understanding of astrophysics, he relishes cybernetic implants and other gadgets, and he clearly enjoys the work of internally consistent worldbuilding. His chronology, at the end of the book, is wildly optimistic and includes telepathy (“affinity”) in the 21st century, but at least it’s extrapolative from vague supernatural premises. That is where the science fiction part ends.

The plot of the novel has two threads. In one thread, protagonist Joshua Calvert has casual sex with a variety of gorgeous young women. In a society where many people expect to live to the age of 180 or 200, teenage girls are statistically overrepresented because, like Robert A. Heinlein, Peter F. Hamilton wrote with one hand down his pants. When Calvert was introduced, I thought that his greedy and murdering ways were intended to mark him as a minor villain, but no, Hamilton thought of Calvert as a charming rogue and a true hero. I believe the character’s hurtful callousness was intended less as a character flaw and more as an excuse for wish fulfillment.

Speaking of wish fulfillment, the second plot thread is hinted at in Calvert’s initials: J.C. for Jesus Christ, with “Joshua” being another name for Jesus, and “Calvert” alluding to Calvary, where the mythological Jesus was crucified. One of the two prologues resembles Triplanetary (1934/1948), but it turns out that Hamilton’s Arisian analogue is only there to put a door stop in the gate to Hell. The initial villains of the book are literal worshippers of Satan as popularly imagined by Christians. The major conflict in the narrative is between Calvert’s heroes and a legion of dead villains who possess the living like demons and give them magical powers.

Pop-Christian fantasy permeates the book, much more than science fiction does. It goes all the way from the nomenclature (Adam, Eden, etc.), via a “medieval torture chamber”, to the fact that a Christian preacher is able to exorcise a demon in a Eurocentric “colony”. It’s a regressive artistic vision, including fabulist scenes of grotesque nightmare clashing with the naturalistic and optimistic science fiction backdrop. At the halfway point, Hamilton inserts a pornographic Regency romance. Calvert does nothing but fuck and make money in Jane Austen’s upper-class England, complete with the Romani of Emma (1815). This stuff satirizes itself.

One problem with the regressive vision is that Hamilton’s bad at it. He’s weirdly naïve. For example, his Hell is a thoughtless amalgam of 1 Samuel’s sheol with a common misunderstanding of atheism. The land of the dead is completely empty, except for the dead. This is how some Christians guess that atheists imagine death, but it is not how atheists themselves imagine death, and it is not an interesting idea. Near the end of the book, Hamilton threatens to warp it into the reincarnation of the famous, as in To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971). Similarly, Hamilton apparently believed that a hereditary monarch is naturally incorruptible and dedicated to the good of their country, so the Christian kingdom of the Saldanas is a very successful polity in his far future. That’s stupid, but it’s also boring to read about. Dune (1965), The Mote in God’s Eye (1974) and even 40K with its medieval demons do much more interesting things with social regression in science fiction. Hamilton just pictured that the female orgasm will still be rare after another 600 years, and stopped thinking there.

References here: Crest of the Stars (1999).

text fiction