Finally finished the second book of Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, The Neutronium Alchemist. This book was much better than the first book of the series, which was pretty awful. I still nearly quit this book two or three times a sitting for the first three or four hundred pages. After that I was committed, and the story picked up. I think Hamilton's books are better in retrospect than they are while they are when actively being read. In retrospect I prune the book down to just the fun stuff. I forget the huge tracts of exposition and needless side story arcs (I seem to recall a good deal of time being spent on a trip to buy seafood in the first book, or in his Commonwealth duology, the hundreds of pointless pages spent on Ozzy walking the Silfen paths).
There are aspects of Hamilton's writing that really annoy me. He is a total stranger to subtlety, for example. Do not go into one of his books expecting elegant writing, you just won't find it. And his clumsy head hopping can be very jarring. We'll be chugging along, in the tight third person limited POV of a character in a spaceship hovering over a planet for a page and a half, then suddenly, with no demarcation other than a standard paragraph break, we'll hop over to the POV of a character on the ground. Or in the middle of a paragraph of third person limited narration we'll suddenly switch without any warning to first person interior monologue (no italics, just a very jarring switch from one sentence to the next - this only happens a few times, which makes it stand out all the more). At times his writing comes off as amateurish.
On the other hand, there is no one writing SF (which in this case probably stands for science fantasy, or space fantasy - what with the soul possessions and magic and whatnot) who writes such complete, detailed, and sprawling settings and stories. There are moments of thrilling, breathless action that work perfectly. Or there are times when I'm wowed by the awesomeness of the world and story. Sometimes he just nails it.
His books are worth reading, in the end. I have to really gear myself up for reading one of his books; I can't randomly grab one off top of my TBR stacks and jump right in. It will likely be a few months before I move on to the last book of this trilogy, and I hope when I do it will be worth the 1100+ page time investment.
I'm moving on to Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, a new release and debut novel I've heard very good things about. I'm excited to dive into it.
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