The Void Trilogy

Today's topic is Space Opera: cast of thousands, countless alien species, some millions of years old and highly evolved. Humans have evolved too: quaint, anachronistic Physicals, bio-enhanced Advancers and Highers who have gone “post-physical” and uploaded themselves into a neural network that takes up most of the space around a now depopulated Earth. And in the center of the universe, a big black Void is swallowing up whole galaxies, causing their inhabitants to flee and creating one heck of a refugee problem. And if that wasn’t enough, someone inside the Void is infecting the dreams of the rest of the universe with a siren song about the idyllic life within.

This is the ambitious setting of Peter F. Hamilton’s three-volume space opera, The Void Trilogy. Set around the year 4000 AD, Hamilton’s epic is a rambling, raucous adventure across time and space. Can the Commonwealth get its multi-species act together to stop the expanding Void? Will the pilgrimage by the believers of The New Dream save or destroy the universe by piercing the Void? And will all 38 versions of Mr. Bovey succeed in bedding the beautiful Araminta?

High-tech gadgetry abounds; faster-than-light travel, real-time streaming of the internet inside your head, and some truly bizarre alternatives to being “just” human. Multiple bodies anyone? The vast number of weird alien cultures, colonized planets, dangerous religious cults and cool technological capabilities is enough to get my sci-fi imagination a-bubbling.

If you like your high-tech high, your space travel FTL and your aliens multi-limbed and multi-colored, Peter F. Hamilton’s The Void Trilogy may be just up your inter-galactic alley. The first volume is entitled The Dreaming Void and you can reserve it here.