Peter F. Hamilton's flair for huge, star-spanning SF adventures continues with Judas Unchained. This concludes the single long novel--over 1,800 pages in all--whose first half is Pandora?s Star.

Humanity's interstellar Commonwealth is in serious trouble. Thirteen of its hundreds of worlds (linked by wormholes and high-speed trains) were lost to a first mass attack by the insanely hostile alien Primes. The controlling Prime intelligence, MorningLightMountain, can imagine no way of dealing with first contact but genocide--and has the resources to do it.

Amid political and personal chaos, it's becoming clear that the war was arranged by a third party. For centuries, only the fanatical, outlawed Guardians cult believed in this mysterious influence called the Starflyer. New evidence emerges, only to vanish again. Key figures are destroyed by near-invincible assassins crammed with inbuilt "wetwired" weaponry. One determined detective is on the track, but she faces massive political opposition.

The multi-stranded action follows many criss-crossing human stories, with fights, pursuits, quests, deaths, resurrections, exotic landscapes and armaments, good sex, and several interesting aliens. Betrayals are frequent, thanks to brainwashed Starflyer agents in positions of trust. Only the Guardians have a scheme to deal with the Starflyer itself--a grandiose strategy known as "the planet's revenge"--but no one trusts those crazy cultists?

In space, the arms race becomes dizzying, with Prime doomsday weapons used against suns while frantic human research leads to "quantumbusters" so appalling that there's serious moral debate about their use. Can we face the guilt of total genocide, even against a horror like MorningLightMountain? Or is there some way to force this psychopathic genie back into the bottle?

The action climaxes in a long, exhilarating chase sequence spiced with ultra-violent skirmishing as the Starflyer comes into the open at last. Stormgliding, an extreme sport introduced in book one, becomes vital to the race against time. Meanwhile, rival starships with different plans chase one another to the Prime system. Hamilton delivers the expected multiple payoffs with suitable pyrotechnics and a satisfying scatter of happy endings. A long, colourful, suspenseful example of modern British space opera. --David Langford

2008-05-28 Steve DeWilde

Hamilton knows how to write a good character. Most of the (very many) people that he introduces in his massive books are developed sufficiently for the reader to identify with, and even care about. I think that in Judas Unchained he has improved in that his female characters seem far more sympathetically drawn than in some of his earlier works. However, he needs a better editor! I can't be the only person who has noticed that almost the only adjective he uses is "big". By the end of the novel I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when "big" was dragged out again. And what is it with this obsession with naming the manufacturer and model of every single vehicle that is mentioned in the text? Occasional mention of a brand like Volvo, adds a dysphoric jolt, that paradoxically makes the story seem more "real". But not even the most seasoned train spotter mentally notes such detail whenever they even see a car or a train, as seems to be the case in the inhabitants of the Commonwealth. A trans-planetary civilisation of ultra obsessional nerds?
Great story, clever twists and turns of the plot, enjoyable characters, well written action and believable sex. Worth reading, even if the ending did seem a little hurried.