The Confederation Handbook

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