The Naked God

Night's Dawn Trilogy, Book 3

By: Peter F. Hamilton

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 48 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

The Confederation is starting to collapse politically and economically, allowing the "possessed" to infiltrate more worlds.

Quinn Dexter is loose on Earth, destroying the giant arcologies one at a time. As Louise Kavanagh tries to track him down, she manages to acquire some strange and powerful allies whose goal doesn't quite match her own.

The campaign to liberate Mortonridge from the possessed degenerates into a horrendous land battle, the kind that hasn't been seen by humankind for 600 years; then some of the protagonists escape in a very unexpected direction. Joshua Calvert and Syrinx fly their starships on a mission to find the Sleeping God, which an alien race believes holds the key to overthrowing the possessed.

The Naked God is the brilliant climax to Peter F. Hamilton's awe-inspiring Night's Dawn trilogy.

©1999 Peter F. Hamilton (P)2016 Tantor

Critic reviews

"The depth and clarity of the future Hamilton envisions is as complex and involving as they come." ( Publishers Weekly)

Audible1

great series with excellent presentation. happy to find the author. definitely reading his other books.

Epic vision and challenging read

In classic Peter Hamilton style, he jumps into many, many separate stories all at once. It takes a bit of perseverance to work through the sense of disconnection as you jump from story line to disparate story line. I stopped and started this book many times as my patience waned predictably. However, the patient reader is handsomely rewarded with a story with epic vision and a really strong central message. The characters are vividly drawn and only slightly over invested with outsized human character strengths and flaws. They don't quite slip into caricatures of innocence, heroism, evil and goodness. But, he skirts the line, intentionally close I believe. Naked God concludes the saga with a powerful leap of simple pragmatic advice. And a whole lot of alien technology. Great story, compelling told and brilliantly read.

Satisfying Ending of a Great Trilogy

Maybe you have heard some disappointed reviews for Book 1? I think this journey has been well worth it.

By now, you should really care about the main characters. And understand them. Nothing much here is a surprise. Until the end. Want spoilers? I’ll put something about story resolution at the end of my review.

I love John Lee. I could happily listen to him read a dictionary. There’s something about that voice and rhythm. It feels like you’re tucked into bed and cozy, while the penultimate protector figure reads you a goodnight story. But not cramps or daddy. More like... the love of your life, or someone who you wish was. Then there are those accents. This guy can do just about anything with his voice. Except sound female. Most of the time, that’s ok. There is a slight difference for female characters, a bit softer and quieter.

But for this trilogy, he just wasn’t at his best. He would sometimes begin a scene with separate accents, and then later they would be lost so you didn’t always know right away who was speaking. Also, in the last 3 hours or so, there are a few times he becomes inexplicably quiet, as if someone turned down the volume. By the time the sentence is over, he’s back to normal. Poor editing? And yes, there are definitely times when there is no extra pause to signal a new scene or chapter.

But that voice!

Why 4 stars? My rating is based on how much I enjoyed the experience, but with a reluctant deduction for the not-so-great moments of narrating, and the ending. Ready for spoilers?

***SPOILERS!***

OK, no real spoilers, just...

The ending. After everything we have been through, the darkness and sex and technical explanations, we deserved a break, right? But a magical fairytale ending? It was satisfying, but not. Also, a character says Quinn Dexter isn’t intelligent enough to pull off his plan, and suddenly everyone has forgotten just how eerily too smart for the world’s good he has been. And thus his downfall is handed over by a magical being who is completely smug with the knowledge of Quinn’s stupidity.... Dexter is not Aladdin’s Jafar! Well, except for at the end apparently.

Epic!

Yet another amazing epic trilogy from the wonderful mind of Peter F. Hamilton. The universe he builds feels like home! Sad to see it end.

Wonderful Story, but completely failed the landing

Okay, first off, this book was written very, very well. The characters are great, the plot has more nuance than you can keep track of, the narration is skilled beyond belief, and the world building is utterly stellar (pun intended). This series is a wonderful saga, and I greatly enjoyed it.

But the ending is bad. Like, really, REALLY bad. Worse than how Wolf Locke ends his stories. The way that the plot had been approaching the solution to a incredibly philosophical dilemma was always clearly too materialistic to provide a satisfactory concussion to this series. Even though every character they come across keeps saying that science won't solve the issue and that humanity needs to find a moral answer to possession and the Beyond, never once does the story even stray near anything of the sort. All anyone is trying to do is to receive a neatly packaged answer from an ascended species or find a scientific method to fight the souls in the Beyond. It was always a weird juxtaposition, but the phenomenal story telling was able to let me overlook it for most of the story.

But at the end of the day, the solution humanity finds is Deus-Ex-Machina-ed to them. LITERALLY. They find a God-Machine, and ask it for the answer, and then BOOM, philosophical climax over. Sure, its a bit more complex than that, and the implementation is still up to them, but Jesus Christ that's almost painfully unimaginative. NO philosophical revelation from their experiences, NO moral uplifting through introspection, NO grand struggle to understand themselves, just a clean answer from soulless machine.

I'm not even that mad about the solution, even through it was a pretty bland one (honesty, "just believe in yourself"?? 130 hours of a grand Sci-Fi adventure and we get what the Wizard of Oz told Dorthy??? You do know real-world morality and philosophy is more complex than that of a children's play, right??), but the way that the characters obtained it was utterly boring. Sure the journey was fun, sure the characters were great, but to simply and so literally Deus-Ex-Machina the answer is so hollow. It made the whole struggle, which was painted to be a critical turning point by the other ascended species, feel like just a box on a checklist. It wasn't even a struggle, really. No one made a brilliant decision that saved the day, no one found enlightenment, they just...found it, like a lost sock, and by almost pure chance at that.

I could kinda see it coming, by the way that the characters keep searching for the answer like it was a physical item instead of a philosophy (i.e. how they asked the Kiint and Tinkerbell), and by how the ascended species kept refusing to give them the answer (as if it was something you COULD give), but it's still very disappointing. I couldn't even finish the last hour and a half I was so disgusted by the "naked god". Maybe it gets better, maybe humanity earns the victory in the end, but I honestly can't believe that'll happen and can't bring myself to find out. I mean, honestly, an author of Peter Hamilton's skill using a (literal and literary) Deus-Ex-Machina is actually insulting.

Didn't even have most of our POV character meet each other. Hell, only like 5 of them know the other's exist at all. Just sad.

TL;DR: Great story, great characters, and a literal Deus Ex Machina to solve it all. I mean, you could see it coming from book 1, but I'm not being hyperbolic when I say "literal". Also, no serious POV character crossovers, so much for their individual character development was kinda for nothing.

Great characters, great plot, and a fantastic ending.

When I started the first of the three books, I was afraid when I got to The Naked God the story would go down hill. It was just the opposite, The Naked God being the best of the three. Great happy ending with very few loose ends.

Stick it out... the whole series is worth it

I started this series, book one, a while back and just couldn't get into it. so much esoteric stuff was happening right in the beginning. Additionally, the way the book is written vs this being an audiobook meant that things weren't intuitively obvious at times: e.g., how the chapters and sections were laid out. The next sentence would start and you have to in your mind catch up to exactly what new disparate scene was unfolding.

All that being said, the entire series was very immersive, very adventurous, and made for a wonderful sci-fi tale. I like the incorporation of theology, culture, ethics, and xenophilosophy. I can't wait to encounter books of a similar ilk.

awesome series

Loved the series. Peter F Hamilton at his finest. Great arc, epic characters, perfect reading.

The ending feels overly conjured given the build up, but it works. Will listen again in a few years just to see what I missed.

Demanding but rewarding indeed

it was a bit of a struggle for me to get through the former two books of this triology, but this book truly made it worth it! A fantastic conclusion to the series, really had me hooked towards the end!

I'd recommend reading Pandoras star and Judas unchained first, if this is your first Hamilton experience (though anyone reading this probably already read the first two books in ths series). It's a bit slow paced, but thar grows on you with Hamilton. And his books will only get better when you read them again!

Excellent conclusion

This book made an excellent conclusion to the trilogy, thing up all the loose ends, if a little too neatly. I still wish that the narrator would have at least tried to mimick female voices for characters. The narrator's lack of female voices is pretty much my only complaint with this entire audio trilogy.