The Reality Dysfunction

I really wanted to like this, since I like Space Opera on a grand scale and a vast canvas, like Banks & early Reynolds. This however, felt bad for 2 reasons.

First, Hamilton is no stylist: the book suffers from a terrible use of language. Wrought sentences, tons of exposition, cheapo images ("if the ship would have had lungs, it would have sighed"), tedious descriptions of things, etc. This is not a standalone novel, so there's 3000 pages of that in the entire series?

A so-so writing style would have been something I could have overcome, but then the content has to be good. As you might have guessed, this wasn't the case either, and that's the second problem of The Reality Dysfunction. While the first chapter still held some promise, the second chapter is a description of the evolution of life on a moon surrounding some planet, but on top of the bad prose, it features factual mistakes (it boldly claims that all first life everywhere in the universe are algae) and yet pretends to be knowledgeable by heaps and heaps of pseudo-scientific English.

Brace yourself for what happens next. (...)

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