Rating: 
Summary: Required reading for Hamilton fans. 4.5 stars
Review: This collection, a mix of new and reprint stories, is set in his
"Night's Dawn" universe. The stories collectively form something
of a prequel to the Reality Dysfunction, and Hamilton presents a
detailed future-history timeline as interstitial material.The core of the book is the previously-unpublished title novella, a
twisty murder-mystery/police-procedural set in the first Edenist
bitek habitat, a He(3)-mining outfit in orbit around Jupiter. The
protagonist, a tough, competent corporate cop with a shaky
marriage, is straight out of Greg Egan or Ed McBain. The setting is
nicely-extrapolated nearish-term hard-SF -- not a dead-demonic
possession in sight, thank heavens. I found it cleaner & more
plausible than his "Greg Mandel" sf-mysteries. Highly
recommended. The other stories range from excellent (Tiarella Rosa, Escape Route)
down to a couple Hamilton might better have left in the trunk.
All feature his trademarks: a glossy, hi-tech future, larger-than-life
characters, lots of sex & violence. It's interesting to see Hamilton
working at shorter lengths, and US readers are unlikely to have
seen these stories before, except perhaps "Escape Route", reprinted
in the Dozois Year's Best for 1997 Happy reading!
Pete Tillman
Rating:
Summary: I couldn't stop reading for 6 hours
Review: This compilation of stories, cleared out the many questions I had about the technologies he uses in the NightDawn trilogy, making it more viable and intrigueing. The plots of the stories were quite funny, often up to the horrific, however not always as consequent as the ones used in the NightDawn trilogy. I sure hope he'll supply us furthermore with this superb quality SF, ritch in ideas, character descriptions and tales of strange worlds, thus becoming one of the writers I hold dearly on top of the bookshelves. I also hope his editor won't rush him into publishing too soon the third part of the Night Dawn trilogy I was expecting to see first. The appearance of this book might be a good sign. Jelle Mulder
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