Product Description

HIDDEN EMPIRE begins a dazzling space opera fit to stand with the classics of the genre, combining the politics of Frank Herbert's DUNE, the scope of Peter F. Hamilton's NIGHT'S DAWN trilogy, and the pageantry and romance of STAR WARS In the far future, humanity began to search the stars, sending out vast spaceships that would take generations to reach their goals. In the depths of space they encountered the Ildiran empire - apparently the galaxy's only other intelligent civilisation. The Ildirans came to Earth and passed on the knowledge of their stardrive, allowing humanity to expand to the stars. Almost two hundred years after that first contact, there are human colonies proliferating through the galaxy. As Mankind seizes the future, danger comes from the past, for two human archaeologists glean forbidden knowledge from the ruins of a dead world. Once, the insect-like Klikiss ruled the stars. Now, only their robot servants remain, guardians of a terrible technology - the Klikiss Torch, which has the power to create suns. Now, Humanity prepares to flex its new found muscle and activate the Torch for the first time in millennia, but there are reasons the Klikiss empire fell, and a train of events is about to be set in motion, that will change the universe...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77815 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

About the Author
Kevin J. Anderson has over 15 million books in print in 27 languages worldwide. He is the author of, among others, the X-FILES novels GROUND ZERO and the JEDI ACADEMY trilogy of STAR WARS novels - the three bestselling SF novels of 1994. He has also co-written the international bestselling prequels to Frank Herbert's monumental DUNE series. He has won, or been nominated for, many awards including the Nebula Award and the Bram Stoker Award.

Customer Reviews

Despite everything, it�s fun.
...space opera it is - sadly, Night's Dawn it isn't.
Anderson starts off well. He has obviously put a lot of thought into the creation of his universe. There are some quite ingenious races and ideas: a race of humans ("Therons") who can communicate telepathically through a symbiotic relationship with alien trees; a race of aliens ("Ildirans") who have similar powers through their emperor. Other concepts are more mundane (not to say derivative), such as a dead alien race whose archaeological artefacts hold the key to some promising technological advances; mysterious alien robots who you just know are going to turn out to be bad guys and worst of all, comic-book, stereotyped space gypsies, the "Roamers".
There are numerous sub-plots. The archaeologists researching the dead race; the human political chairman manipulating events from behind the scenes, whilst the King is a mere figurehead; the Navy chasing pirates; Theron priests spreading their sentient trees to other planets. In it's multiplicity of sub-plots, Hidden Empire wears it's debt to Night's Dawn clearly on it's sleeve.
On the surface it all sounds good.
Sadly, where Anderson drops the ball is in his characterisation, pacing and dialogue.
The characters all tend to be two-dimensional. There are numerous races and factions, but every Roamer is painted exactly the same as every other Roamer - every Theron is a mirror image of every other Theron - every human-built robot is a C3-P0 clone (unsurprisingly, Anderson has written some Star Wars novels).
The subplots all seem to be very hurried. Whereas Hamilton's Night's Dawn spent a large proportion of the first book setting the story of a doomed colony in beautiful detail, Anderson attempts to gloss over large aspects of his subplots in order to get to the inevitable war. Because of this, we never get to really empathise with any of his characters.
But by far the worst aspect of this book is the dialogue. It is embarrassing. I literally cringed at times. Most of the characters speak in continual rhetorical questions and spend an awful lot of time telling other characters things that they (and we) already know. Particularly tiresome are the Roamers. It seems that whenever two or more Roamers get together, they spend most of their time telling each other "We are Roamers, we must always bear that burden with stoicism but yet hold joy in our hearts". Yes, they really do talk like that!
And it gets worse. The bearer of bad tidings rushes into a Roamer conference and declares "Oh! But I have terrible news!" One can almost hear him swoon! The Admiral of the Earth's battlefleet calls his men to arms with the immortal cry "All ships! All commanders! Fire at will! Let's get those b*******!" Come back Captain Picard, all is forgiven!
Anderson also displays a dreadful lack of scientific knowledge. One of his skymines, floating in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet has an observation deck which is open to the atmosphere - air which the crew can breathe! Add to that a couple of plot holes the size of New Mexico (the Ildiran leader knows the events of the first few chapters will spark an interstellar war that could result in the extinction of his race and the humans, yet he still allows the events to take place. The humans cannot fight the new enemy, yet the very thing that sparked the war is the one thing against which the enemy has no defence) and it all starts to look pretty dire.
But happily, it's not!
Despite my (many) reservations, I did enjoy this book. As a previous reviewer has stated, it's a fun albeit lightweight read. Although quite a hefty tome, running to more than 650 pages, it took me less than three days to read. I found it to be a welcome break from the likes of Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, which has been my preference of late. The scope is wide and the overall plot is quite compelling.
The book *is* space opera, but think more along the lines of EE "Doc" Smith, rather than Peter F Hamilton. Would I recommend it? If you are looking for a SF classic, then no. But if you don't set your expectations too high and are willing to forgive the plot holes and execrable dialogue, then yes, I believe you will enjoy it.
As for my part, I *will* be buying the second book of the saga when it is published, so make of that what you will!

Great start for an epic story
As you start to read the first few chapters, you realise that a foundation is being laid for a huge tale.
There are a lot of characters on seemingly seperate paths that begin to converge further into the book. To some extent this is both it's strongest and weakest point - where the complex threads are woven together to produce a story of intrigue, thrills, shocks, outrage and despair, there are a few too many characters to follow in the kind of depth that perhaps you would prefer.
Probably the best characterisation and story line is that of the two xeno-archeologists, studying the remnants of the lost, space-faring Klikiss civilisation. Perhaps the trees are the worst.

Earth is the centre of a vast inter-planetary empire that is voraciously gobbling up as much free cosmic real estate it can lay it's hands on. It can only do this because of a seemingly benevolent contribution of technology by the much older and techologically stagnating race, the Ildirans. Having discovered some impressive technology from the long dead Klikiss civilisation, the humans decide to "press it and see". The consequences of this is that it provokes a war with a species of highly sophisticated and very dangerous aliens that no one knew even existed. Throw in conspiracies, love, tragedy, treachery, mystery, tension and massive military actions and you have a great yarn on your hands.
There are some sections you need to plough through but more still that just can't be put down - you have to keep on reading.
The book ends with an "arghhhh!" that leaves you feeling a bit gutted. I want to read the next volume straight away!.

Makes it up as he goes along
I agree with most of the previous reviewers.. This book is actually an okay start. Unfortunately I am a junkie for completion so I went ahead and ordered the rest of the series which quickly becomes really dire stuff.

Starting off with the good:

A lot of people complained about the short chapters - I don't mind them. I have kids so it's harder to get time to read and the short chapters make the book easy to read over your cornflakes in the morning, etc - 5 mins here and there gets you through it.

He has constructed a nice, if simplistic universe here - all the standard ingredients: human/alien empires/colony worlds/miner race (roamers) and mysterious artifacts & aliens. In the early books, the King versus Chairman thing is an okay interplay.

The bad:
Okay I know I'm reading sci-fi so things don't have to make sense but the sheer amount of impossible things that happen beggars belief and will have you gnashing your teeth at times, and character depth just isn't there.

- Scale is way off. Planets are like villages in the wild-west. The average population of a planet seems to be a few hundred "hardy" colonists. If you land on a world, anywhere, you will soon bump into the colonists that are on it.

- Central characters keep getting weird and "wonderful" powers for no good reason. In this series, if you fall into a sun you are more likely to become some kind of a ridiculous fire-creature than to die. The plot seems to rely on impossible coincidences and outlandish magic rather than clever writing.

- Each member of each species is identical to each other. For example all the roamers have the same principles and beliefs.

- We are given no idea of how the ildiran stardrive is meant to work, but it seems to be like a souped up version of a normal engine running on hydrogen that can just plain crank you around faster... accelerating and decelerating into star systems and hopping from planet to planet within a star system in minutes. No mention of relativity or how it's effects are circumvented.

- Plot holes galore everywhere really test your patience.

- Plenty of dumb filler chapters where e.g. people "dance on trees" to ignite some stupid worldforest spirit.

- traders move from planet to planet with a small cargo container of food. I live in a small sized town and thousands of trucks of food are needed to sustain it each day. The idea of interstellar vegetable deliveries in truck-sized ships is ludicrous. Plus there seem to be only about 5 traders in the whole galaxy.

- interspecies breeding is no problem whatsoever.

- Don't get me started on thism this kind of mystic force that binds the ildiran race. What a poor idea and so inconsistently implemented.

- he keeps rehashing old ground.. constantly. Most times character X is mentioned he has a paragraph explaining X's history.

- he keeps using the same descriptive terms - "Impenetrable diamond warglobe", "mysterious black kilkiss robot", etc.

- laws of physics are ignored. We have lots of things like sound in vacuums, people breathing in gas giant atmosphere, total ignorance of the scale of interplanetary and interstallar travel, magic creatures, etc.

It really felt to me as though he was making it up as he went along with little or no forward planning or structure. His goal was to fill out and sell 7 books and worse fool me as after reading the 1st book I said "ah sure I might as well order the rest" and so his tactic worked in my case. However he'd be better off writing smaller, better thought-out books as it might encourage repeat purchases - as it is I won't be buying any more Kevin Anderson books.

Life is too short to get started on this series... it's frankly a bit embarrasingly bad.

My fav sci-fi books are Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton, Orson Scott Wells, etc. I wanted to like it.. I really did... but it was just so bad.!