Peter F. Hamilton's latest, Great North Road, fits with his general style -- sprawling stories that take place across planets, with just enough science to make them plausible. It combines mystery, action, flawed characters, and an unreliable narrator to good effect.
This book is like a cross between The Thing and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, compounded with a police procedural and a field guide to plants. And it gave me a chance to read about what Newcastle, England, might be like in a hundred or so years. The effects of climate change are alluded to but not made completely clear, but there has also been massive migration off-planet, so the pressures on Earth's environment have probably eased considerably. (The traffic around town is still incredibly bad, despite automated cars.)
So if you've got a few weeks to dedicate to a fairly diverting science fiction story, pick up a copy. If you don't get a chance to read it, you can always use it to work out your biceps.
2 comments:
I liked that book too. Hamilton's "Commonwealth" books - "Pandora's Star" and "Judas Unchained" - are excellent as well.
I loved Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, too. So much that I also read all six of the Void books... which I found so annoyingly overwritten that I gave them away. (Not something I have a habit of doing, being a bit of book collecting obsessive.) But Great North Road puts Hamilton back in my good graces.
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