Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45235 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

Synopsis
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...

Customer Reviews

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.!

Dull, bland and predictable
By the time I was about halfway through this turgid potboiler the biggest impression I was was one of amazement.

Amazement about how it could be that the publishers were prepared to print this rubbish, let alone sign Anderson on for a series of 7 volumes of it!

The plot is predictable, obvious and hackneyed and the setting is sci-fi lite, sub-star trek. The writing is simply a list of events, punctuated by ill-fitting dialog. Nothing gives the reader the impression that the author enjoyed producing this. There's no passion, depth, poetry or soul.

The worst things though are the characters, which are two-dimensional and indistinct from each other, and the stilted, turgid dialog which falls out of their cardboard mouths. People, past or future, simply do not speak to each other like this. Practically every exchange is simply cringeworthy.

Unpickupable.

A Great Saga
It's one of the best original Sci-fi Sagas I've read. At some points it moves a bit slowly, but over all it's enjoyable, and really inspires. But imagination is required! I've read 5 of the 6 available books and i'm ordering book 6, To see the "big picture" in Kevin J. Anderson detailed Universe you have to read most of the available books, thing's begin to make sense in a Sci-fi way as you read on. Things recommended roughly along those lines would be X3 (pc game), SGA (TV series. google them).