The Reality Dysfunction

Night's Dawn Trilogy, Book 1

By: Peter F. Hamilton

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 41 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

In AD 2600, the human race is finally beginning to realize its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets scattered across the galaxy host a multitude of prosperous and wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary spaceborn creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive on the wealth created by the industrialization of entire star systems, and throughout inhabited space the Confederation Navy keeps the peace. A true golden age is within our grasp.

But now something has gone catastrophically wrong. On a primitive colony planet, a renegade criminal's chance encounter with an utterly alien entity unleashes the most primal of all our fears. An extinct race that inhabited the galaxy aeons ago called it the Reality Dysfunction. It is the nightmare that has prowled beside us since the beginning of history.

©1996 Peter F. Hamilton (P)2016 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Elements of space opera, Straubesque horror and adrenaline-laced action make this a demanding, rewarding read." ( Publishers Weekly)

Finally on Audible!! My favorite Hamilton series!

This book and it's sequels (Neutronion Alchemist, and The Naked God) are simply fantastic. In my opinion, this series is Hamilton's best work. Huge galactic scope, Elizabethan themes, 1940's gangsters, Interstellar travel, a very disturbing take on the Apocalypse, Sentient Cities, bio-engineering ethics (and advantages), telepathy, dystopias and utopias, interesting aliens, the Afterlife, cyborgs, cults, underworld syndicates, horror, etc, etc....

The page to page writing is arguably inferior to Hamilton's later stuff, but the ideas here are so dang grand! This is a Big Story with lots of point of view characters.

Like most of Hamilton's books, the start is a bit slow - with many characters and societies introduced, but once it gets going the momentum is impressive. Stick with it - it's worth it.

****As of writing this review you still need to download in parts, whole book download will not work (hopefully this is fixed soon). ***

Quick tip, I love John Lee as a reader, but I enjoy his reading and performance at 1.25 playback speed even more.

Great story but confusing editing.

Great story and reading performance, but there were no breaks between sub chapters. With so many characters and locations the scene changes were confusing without a audio break to signal them.

Yep. It's Dysfunctional all right!

For the record, I only made it to the 20hr mark in this book. So if there's some big reveal that makes it all worth it, then good on the people who bore through it.

First off, the Narrator is actually decent. Not great, but decent. He's basically got one vocalization for all the characters, so pay close attention to the text or you'll be skipping back for the "said she" and "he said". That said, it's a decent voice with moderate inflection, interesting dynamics. The works. The frequent changes the author makes between scenes and entire story arcs also often misses an appropriate pause, which leaves you wondering how on earth they got all the way on the other side of the galaxy. Oh, right, scene change. More skipping back to find out exactly where.

Reality Dysfunction is billed as SciFi, but we fairly quickly see it's a supernatural horror. The lasers and space ships take a quick backseat to demons possessing people, some crazy Satanist cult, and a race of angel "analogs" (one of the words the author LOVES). It doesn't really do SciFi well, anyway. The author has no real new ideas. Cybernetics? How original! Sentient biological ships? We've just never seen anything like that before! Blissful socialist hive-mind societies, so scientifically enlightened that they can definitively disregard any religion as a caveman practice? Oh, right. That was basically the entire Star Trek series. My bad.

That's all very forgivable. A decent author can take a well explored landscape and bring you on a grand adventure if he can make interesting characters that you can love, hate, and then later wonder "What would Huckleberry Finn say to the officer walking up behind my car?" when you get pulled over for doing 65 in a 25 zone. Little hint for the author: Interesting characters are more then boring, predictable nameplates in unusual situations (another thing the book could use). Here the characters are as flat as a picture of pancakes printed on cheap paper, and as predictable as a labrador with a bacon wielding toddler. The author knows one trick, and it's the oldest trick in the book: porn. Some sex in a book is usually expected. But every single time, and done so crudely that you can see it coming twenty minutes of audio off? Every woman in the book (who isn't an antagonist) is either under 25 and a supermodel, or might as well be because she's got "geneering", so they'e ready to go for exotic sex at a look whether they're 15 or 75. One of the main characters, Joshua, is just the same. Every time we get a scene change, there's a new girl. Guess what? She's either eligible and droppable or scandalously desperate. And you the listener get a long description of how they bump uglies. The antagonist is basically the same, except he's gang raping the girl and murdering her afterward. After all, complex, well rounded bad guys do that because they know they're evil and do bad things for the sake of wrongness.

If that's your thing, Google Images should be able to point you in the right direction. If you're looking for an engaging novel, don't waste your time. Move along. Nothing to see here.

All about randy rutting, body snatching, rutting

First off, I don't know of any other author who incorporates science as thoroughly in their novels as well as providing significant details about the various characters and their roles in the story. It is one of the aspects I enjoy most when picking up a Peter Hamilton novel. This, along with John Lee's excellent narration skills, usually makes for a highly entertaining experience.

Peter continues with his in-depth approach in this novel but in the case, it worked to detract from the flow and continuity of the story. There are way too many characters being introduced that it's not too long before one loses track of what role each character is playing. Also, too often he spends too little time outlining a new story arc when the next thing one realizes is that it has jumped to another, unrelated story arc.

This is also the first SciFi novel I've read where so much time is spent; albeit tastefully and artfully, on couples "getting it on". It came off almost as being included as a means of keeping readers engaged but, for me, it was over done.

Definitely not the Commonwealth

If you, like me, are expecting something akin to the Commonwealth books you might be disappointed. This is more like a paranormal thriller that happens to take place in a futuristic SciFi world, and if that sounds like a bit much, it is. Still if you can get past the satanist murder/sex cults and don't mind a morbid portrait of the afterlife it's an engaging story that will keep you wondering what's going to happen next all the way to the end until you're wondering "What hell did I just listen to, and should I buy the sequel?"

a bit confusing

this was by no means a bad book. it was pretty cool, and even epic in some parts. but there was so many different story lines and characters and the book bounced around between all of them. it was a little hard to follow at times while at other times I found myself deeply engrossed. overall I recommend this to any fan of truly hard scifi. bur not for those with short attention spans.

Technical problem overcome on iPhones

What did you love best about The Reality Dysfunction?

My star ratings are "presumed because I am a serious Peter Hamilton fan and he has never failed to disappoint. I wanted to share a quick technical note to all who purchase this book to download on your iPhone and are having problems. It is only a Reality Dysfunction!

The book DOES DOWNLOAD...
Under the app More... button, > Settings: there is a feature called "Download By Parts". Turn that on.
The 41 hours creates a single file that is above the file size limit of the iPhone operating system. It downloads in parts just fine!
So to me fellow PFH fans... Enjoy, Enjoy, Enjoy!!!
I am getting started now and may increase my ratings to 5 star before I am done.

Who was your favorite character and why?

TBD

Which character – as performed by John Lee – was your favorite?

TBD

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

TBD

Any additional comments?

Audible needs to put an instruction on really long books that informs folks to the issues above. It is such an awesome system overall, but that functions is buried pretty deep and not intuitive. I noted that they started to default to the single file format when they got the "sync across devices" thing in full swing.
Few but our wonderful Scifi and Fantasy writers give us tomes that would be at issue.

Great book, incompetent users..

Sad to see a new release get one star reviews because the reviewers can't be bothered to try and fix a simple technical issue. Just turn on the "download by parts" feature people! It downloads fine.

Anyway, this was the first book I read in the Commonwealth saga. Glad to see it's finally on Audible, and John Lee is a great narrator. I'd recommend probably starting with Pandora's star if you're new to Hamilton space opera, but it's not required. This series does a decent job of standing on its own.

iPhone listener's! This download works!

Audio books automatically download in large complete files. There is a setting in the app that changes it to download in parts. Change that setting and this book downloads with no problems. Android listener's get a message prompt to inform them of this setting when the problem occurs(iPhones are weird!!!).
The book, the author and the narrator are and always have been excellent. The combination of PFH's writing and John Lee's vocal performance adds up to one of the best audio books I've ever listened to.

F Yeah

I've been waiting for the Night's Dawn Trilogy to come out in audio for the longest time now, ever since my friends got me to read Pandora's Star. The first book in the series "The Reality Dysfunction", is by far the best book that I've read from this author because there is only one Peter F. Hamilton for science fiction. Now I understand why my friends has been ra ra over this series. The downside of all of this is we now have to wait for the last two books to be published in audio.

By no means "The Reality Dysfunction" is an easy read. The story is very dense and there are so many characters to remember that I had a rough time at keeping track at where I left off. I would not wanted to listen to this book over an extended period of time. Most of the times, I like to dive into 40+ hours head first before it becomes a chore.

All I have to say about the first book in the series is, "F Yeah!" Finally it came out on audio. I hope "The Neutronium Alchemist" and "The Naked God" will be coming out soon.

PFH is the man for sci-fi. There is no one that comes close to his style of writing. Somehow all of his books are connected to Commonwealth.