Fallen Dragon

Fallen Dragon by Peter Hamilton is a depressing read but I'm not sure it was intended to be depressing. Which makes the whole read just a little bit more disturbing. This is a book with a philosophy behind it and I'm not sure I personally support it. Still, I strive to be as unbiased as possible- a review loaded with individual preferences and opinions isn't much use to anyone after all.

Fallen Dragon follows a fairly simple structure in which chapters alternate between the present and flashbacks. The main plot follows career soldier Lawrence Newton on his latest adventure- yet another invasion of a colony world. The book doesn't waste time filling in his tragic past. In fact it deflates the action of the main plot completely as a large chunk of the first third of the book is devoted to Lawrence's childhood and teenage romance. There isn't much to recommend to these flashbacks- they are overly long and lack drama for the most part. It is all in the service of world building of course, the problem is the world being built isn't very compelling. For the most part it seems to be life as usual. Apparently alien worlds are mostly filled with hotels and ski resorts. The rest of the flashbacks I found interesting, so don't despair.

The future in Fallen Dragon is a grim one. Corporations based on earth have all the military power and use that power to raid the far flung colonies of man. Since Lawrence is one of the corporate foot soldiers and also a big believer in the benevolence of corporations towards the end of the book we are put in the awkward  position of kind of rooting for these monstrous pirates. The age of human expansion is ending as there is no money in creating more colonies. All opponents of the oppressive corporate mono-culture are dismissed by our hero as fanatics and idiotic idealists. As for the reason human progress is grinding to a halt, spoilers, its poor people. The mindset and cynicism behind the book I found a too ugly to get much enjoyment out of the book.

The book has it's good points though. Lawrence is an interesting character: he is jaded, a dreamer, and a nihilist in equal turns. Some of the technology in the book is pretty cool although descriptions of fictional spaceplanes and whatnot sometimes border on fetishistic. While grim, the plot at least is fairly engaging. And perhaps the best thing going for Fallen Dragon is that it IS disturbing and ethically challenging. The world of the future is going to be as morally horrifying to our modern day eyes as our culture would be to someone from the 1800s. If anything Fallen Dragon could have gone even further.

So, in summary, Fallen Dragon is definitely a book you could read. It isn't a great read but it's certainly not a horrible book. It would rate 4.5/10 on a sci-fi review blog.