Product Description

Peter F.Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy has proved one of the best-selling Science-Fiction series of the last decade, and the most dramatically successful from a UK author. This handbook is an essential companion volume for all the countless readers past, present and future for whom this massive trilogy has evolved into a defining SF classic. It comprises general background information relating to all three volumes, with comprehensive notes and glossaries on the major characters, planets, space stations, political hierarchies, weaponry, spacecraft, invasions, and the many alien races with their diverse social economies, industries and technologies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85630 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Remember those fact-filled appendices in Frank Herbert's Dune and JRR. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings? Here's the equivalent--though separately packaged--for Peter Hamilton's enormous and popular Night's Dawn SF trilogy, comprising The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God, plus related stories collected in A Second Chance at Eden.

As a "non-fiction" companion volume, The Confederation Handbook maps out this future galaxy's joyous complications. Technologies: the affinity gene allowing telepathic man/machine communication; neural-nanonics implants which link your brain to the net; intelligent voidhawk and blackhawk spacecraft; forbidden antimatter weapons; and space drives. People: human Adamists who reject the affinity gene; Edenists whose affinity links offer a "real" afterlife that replaces religion, struggling colonists everywhere; and three very different alien species--the Tyrathca, Kiint and Jiciro. Places: crowded old Earth with its O'Neill halo of orbital installations; communist Mars; utopian Edenist habitats mining helium-3 fusion fuel from gas-giant planets; quirkily various colony worlds; and the mysterious alien wreckage of the Ruin Ring.

The Handbook carefully, almost too carefully, avoids spoiler revelations about the apocalyptic action of Night's Dawn. As in those books, its Timeline stops before the main story begins, and--besides names of "Possessors" in a cast list slightly updated from The Naked God's--the superpowered returned dead who threaten the entire Federation aren't mentioned at all. Readers nervous of SF terminology may find this a useful guide to the trilogy's huge, exhilarating blend of roller-coaster action and ghost-train chills. --David Langford

About the Author
Born and still living in Rutland, Peter F. Hamiton began writing in 1987 and sold his first short story in 1988. After three novels featuring Greg Mandel, he began on The Reality Dysfunction, the first volume of his outstandingly successful Night's Dawn trilogy, which was followed by The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God.

Customer Reviews

well worth a read
Although a lot of the content is already covered in the book, it goes into further details about the universe and helps you create a better image of the universe that the book is set. Probably best to buy it before finishing the trilogy as it will let you understand it a lot better.

Essential and Informative
A must have guide to the masterful epic that is Peter.F.Hamilton's 'Night's Dawn Trilogy'. 'The Confederation Handbook'details everything from corperations, to space flight, weapons, planets, alien species, and a guide to the characters and habitats, together with the various religions such as the Adamists and Edenists. 'The Confederation Handbook' is not only informative, but also a good read on Hamilton's magnificant universe. If you have the 'Night's Dawn Trilogy' and
'A Second Chance At Eden', you must buy this. I was lucky enough to get a signed copy of this from 'Forbidden Planet' in London.

Why should we need this?
I only read the first volume of this trilogy and bought this handbook with it...and I still ask myself: why? It is pretty useless, because Mr. Hamilton explains everything about the planets in his novel already. And there are huge scientific flaws...why should the Confederation be dependent on Helium 3 as energy source? Of all the Helium in the cosmos, this isotope only makes 0.00014%...hardly an abundant substance. And there is complete nonsense on the astronomical side...Norfolk should be uninhabitable in a close binary system filled with asteroids, Lalonde's continents must be constantly flooded by the tidal forces of its three moons, and just how are the hundreds of asteroids in Earth's orbit kept in their trajectory? And how do bitek organisms survive the radiation in the gas giants radiation belts? And where does the food for the 38 billion humans on Earth come from if the surface is devastated? What really confirms my impression that Hamilton has no talent for character development is the short section about the leading characters...it tells us, well literally nothing about them. Like the whole trilogy, this is disappointing.