The Neutronium Alchemist

Peter F. Hamilton

Sep 2009 · Sold by Orbit

About this ebook

The Neutronium Alchemist is the second novel in the Night's Dawn Trilogy from Peter F. Hamilton, an extraordinary feat of storytelling on a truly epic scale.
 
The ancient menace has finally escaped from Lalonde, shattering the Confederation's peaceful existence. Those who succumbed to it have acquired godlike powers, but now follow a far from divine gospel as they advance inexorably from world to world.

On planets and asteroids, individuals battle for survival against the strange and brutal forces unleashed upon the universe. Governments teeter on the brink of anarchy, the Confederation Navy is dangerously over-stretched, and a dark messiah prepares to invoke his own version of the final Night.

In such desperate times the last thing the galaxy needs is a new and terrifyingly powerful weapon. Yet Dr. Alkad Mzu is determined to retrieve the Alchemist — so she can complete her thirty-year-old vendetta to slay a star. But Joshua Calvert is not alone in the chase to find and stop her, and there are people on both sides who have their own ideas about how to use the ultimate doomsday device.
 
"A space opera that is big, boisterous, and has something for everyone." —Science Fiction Weekly

The Night’s Dawn Trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God

Ratings and reviews

The series is good, though slow, and having read the Commonwealth books already, simply not up to the level I hoped for. Also, having read those, this series is comprised of early versions of all his same ideas, with the exception of the central plot premise. Everything else, all of his sci-fi ideas, are echoes of more fleshed out ideas from Commonwealth (with the exception of Edenism, which is better by far than the Commonwealth analog). And since the main plot is slow to start and kinda lame, it's a good thing he writes good characters. But the real killer is the formatting in the ebooks. It's just horrible. At first I thought it was bad writing, because entire section breaks are missing, leading to changing POV characters in one page, and even in paragraphs. It makes it very hard to get into when you constantly need to pause and restructure what is on the screen into something that makes sense. This series is probably the worst I've read in that regard, and considering this is not Hamilton's best work, I can't recommend spending money on it, at least in this format.

Amazing, imaginative. You won't find a better storyteller. Hamilton delivers world's and universes of incredible detail and complexity. This will keep you up long after your bedtime.

I've continued reading into the second book. But I think I finally lost hope of a plot I can follow. The story send good but ..

About the author

Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland, England in 1960. He began writing in 1987, and sold his first short story to Fear magazine in 1988. He has also been published in Interzone and the In Dreams and New Worlds anthologies, and several small press publications. His first novel was Mindstar Rising, published in 1993, and he has been steadily productive since then. Peter lives near Rutland Water with his wife and two children.