Rating: 
Summary: well crafted thoughtful writing
Review: I have read this entire series. I have deeply enjoyed each installment. It is apparent, from the writing, that the author is weaving a multitude of social, moral, and technological issues into a wonderfully imaginative and thought provoking series. Each book is satisfying and the finale does not disappoint. I am eagerly awaiting more of Mr. Banks works!
Rating: 
Summary: Too big a mouthful!
Review: So this is the climax to the "Nights Dawn " trilogy - A "deus ex machina" indeed! Gripping to the finish, but ultimately disappointing. A rollicking yarn of around 3600 pages all wrapped up in the last 10 or so, puh-lease! The first two books in this series were so gripping that I had to force myself to go to work in the mornings and not just stay in bed reading all day. The sense of expectation, all the exciting plotlines rushing towards some enormous and totally inevitable conclusion was so tremendous that you really needed a majestic ending to it all, not some fairy tale thing, over so quickly that you had to read it again to notice that it had happened at all.The overall impression I gained from this book is that the author, having developed all these marvellous storylines in the earlier novels, ran out of steam when it came to "closure". All the problems, the inexorable spreading of the posessed, Quinn Dexter, Joshua's love life etc. had to be solved and it really looked like he had bitten off more than he could chew. I think he had to end it quickly before he ran out of motivation. Having been very critical up to this point, it is still a very enjoyable book and I found it most refreshing to read an English SF space opera by an English author, full of obscure English cultural references. A planet called Norfolk with a capital called Norwich for Gods sake!! Populated by a landowning pastoral society! I hope my fellow East Anglians arent too upset by all the stereotyping - personally I found it hilarious. And there are so many little gems to be found - my favourite being a very brief cameo of ex PM Maggie Thatcher appearing as one of the posessed - in an "antique blue suit!" Get her into that Zero tau pod QUICK! Priceless.
Rating: 
Summary: Unexploited potential, bad ending, others
Review: The whole trilogy was a very ambitious project and I suppose it's hard to get everything right when you deal with such a huge amount of information. I enjoyed it, but I have some warnings for the future readers (spoilers !!): 1. The ending is a complete let down. As others have said but it can't be said enough times, it's the simplest solution, and I felt like a punctured ballon upon reading it. It was like a children's story... why bother creating all the tension and suspense if in the end it serves for nothing? It makes you feel that all the struggle was completely useless. What was the point of all the research if in the end somebody else with godlike powers solved the crisis for us? 2. The hero. Joshua is just a little bit too... I don't know what. I really think the person who is able to save the universe should not concern himself 80% of the time with sex. (This happened mostly in the previous volumes.) He is really a very simplistic hero, his intuition included. I felt more for Erick Thrakar than for him. Also, I think perhaps he was just *a little* inspired from Isaac Asimov's hero in Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth (I can't remember his name :) who was actually better. Other characters: I really felt for Fletcher and I think he deserved better. I was expecting him to actually do something but he didn't. Liol... whatever he was introduced for?! The side conflict about Joshua discovering he had a brother was useless. 3. The whole satanistic talk. The concepts behind this book were really very interesting and I think they could have been introduced in another way, not through Quinn Dexter and the sects. It was really disappointing, it gave the whole thing a biblical aura, strenghtened by the vocabulary: souls, posession etc etc. Religion was not the issue at all and all the violent descriptions connected to satanism I could have done without. And in a SF book I expect another type of villain, not a religious fanatic; Laton was better. Come on, this devil talk and all the crap is for the 15th century, not the 26th or whatever. All in all, it is worth reading. But it could have been better.
Rating: 
Summary: Naked God: Avert your eyes
Review: I read the previous four books of this series, and although initially I really did not want to like them because of the many clichés and the Space Opera (I'm not using the term in any positive sense)style, the excellent plotting and the interesting situations kept me turning the pages at a mad rate. How did the souls of the dead gain possession of the living, and how did such mystical / religious ideas fuse with Science Fiction? What was the "Naked God" that the aliens found in their long migration voyage? But whatever it was that kept me interested seems to have disappeared entirely from the fifth installment of the series. Reading about Al Capone and his Space-Ghost Mafia has lost any sort of believability. And although I am still curious about some of the unanswered questions, my curiosity is not strong enough to compel me to read through any more of this dreck. The first four books were captivating reading, but there is no payoff, so you might think twice about starting the series. I really was looking forward to these last two books, so to discover that the quality has gone down so much is a sore disappointment. --TR--
Rating:
Summary: Read this Series
Review: ...The books are huge, well-thought out and paced, with a cast of interesting characters who are a pleasure to spend time with - even the worst of them. The technologies are fun to contemplate and the philosophy is not at all preachy or predictable. If you enjoy immersing yourself in giant universes for long periods of time you will find no better set of books to do it in than these. The books are great reading and worth your time....
Rating:
Summary: Racing towards the finish
Review: If you're this far into the series already, is anything I say really going to sway you either way? So I guess this will be targeted towards new readers who might be wondering if they should invest in reading thousands of pages if the later books stink to high heaven. Rest assured, dear reader, the first half of the last book keeps the same quality as the other books, I've found this to be almost conpulsive in making me keep turning pages, Hamilton as the rare ability to keep plots spinning and zips you through so many plots that while you can keep them straight (most of the time) you rarely get bored. Most of the plots are fairly crucial more or less to the final cascading plot, so moreso than others and they are more wildly split by distance and importance than the other books but we're still treated to lots of action and some philosophy, everyone is getting gtim as they move the players into the last stages of the battle, we're getting near do or die time folks. The intensity is almost unrelenting sometimes and some of the payoffs are better than others but Hamilton leavens it out with enough humor or horror to keep things interesting, his characters may not be the most well rounded people in existence but they are a fun bunch that you won't mind cozying up to for seven hundred pages (or more if you've been reading since the beginning). There's not much I can say without giving away the plot to the entire series, if I skimp too much it sounds like "Same old same old" I mean yes the possessed are still taking over people and those folks not possessed are trying to stop it and everyone's fighting or trying to find solutions or whatnot . . . but if I go into too much detail then I'll be giving away too much or it won't make any sense. So let me just say that if you're read this far you probably won't be disappointed and if you're thinking of starting, the quality of the series tends to remain high throughout, which is a rare occurrance these days. Hopefully the ending will be just as good, we'll see I guess.
Rating:
Summary: Good book, but a little difficult to come back to
Review: This series is very interesting, engrossing, and full of interesting characters, technology, and philosopies, all set in a very plausible future for humankind only 700 years off. This book is very similar in structure to Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy, in the large number of overlapping story lines going on. Unfortunately, after the long hiatus from the preceeding four books in the series (technically, he calls them two books in two volumes each) coming back to it was a little challenging. Fortunately, though, he includes a full six page cast of characters in the front of the book, as well as a "timeline" in the rear, which helped during the first 50-100 pages until the rest came back to me. Another very good book set in the same universe is "A Second Chance at Eden." This is a book of short stories, and was a very enjoyable read while waiting for this book to be published. As with his other books, don't expect to put this down until you finish it - and it will take a while, with his detailed story, engrossing style, and 600+ pages of goodness.
Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing ending
Review: If you are planning to buy the series do not. The ending is terrible, unimaginative and spoils all 3 books. The author judging from his creativity in the books could have done much better offering a much more satisfying ending. I would rather have the story end with total devastation than salvation by a "god" like entity. Most disappointing was the way the author ended all the other plots. A quick, sloppy and more suitable to children's books approach that leaves a mature reader wondering which is the audience the author was targeting.
Rating:
Summary: Slightly disappointing end, but hey its his story.
Review: The conclusion to this classic space opera was not all that it could have been. After setting up what was by far one of the best worlds, and some of the best ideas that I have ever seen in the space opera genre, the ending was rather anti-cliamatic and aimed rather low. After coming up with a very philosophical approach to death and to the afterlife, I found the way he ended it comparatively weak. This said, this is still one of the best sci-fi series to come out recently. The series is built up with some solid characters, and deals well with some very profound implications. If he had pushed the envelope just a little more, he could have created a truely great series. The universerse that Hamilton created is very strong if not totally original. He combines some of the best receint ideas brought up in science fiction(bio-computers and live spaceships, it works better than it sounds), and recreates it with a star wars twist that works suprisingly well. He goes a little over the top on some of his side storys. The first book has the main character acting like his auditioning for a Heinlen novel. But when he sticks to his story he makes the reader forget that this is supposed to be pulp fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Good book.
Review: If you've read this far into the series you aren't going to stop before you've read this one. The Naked God is a good book but I thought the ending was a bit cheap (I wont say why as that would spoil the whole book). For such a panoramic book there ought to have been a stronger ending but everything else about it is first rate and I recommend that everybody read it and reading the first two books first naturally.
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