The Confederation Handbook [Paperback]

Remember those fact-filled appendices in Frank Herbert's Dune and JRR. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings? Here's the equivalent--though separately packaged--for Peter Hamilton's enormous and popular Night's Dawn SF trilogy, comprising The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God, plus related stories collected in A Second Chance at Eden.

As a "non-fiction" companion volume, The Confederation Handbook maps out this future galaxy's joyous complications. Technologies: the affinity gene allowing telepathic man/machine communication; neural-nanonics implants which link your brain to the net; intelligent voidhawk and blackhawk spacecraft; forbidden antimatter weapons; and space drives. People: human Adamists who reject the affinity gene; Edenists whose affinity links offer a "real" afterlife that replaces religion, struggling colonists everywhere; and three very different alien species--the Tyrathca, Kiint and Jiciro. Places: crowded old Earth with its O'Neill halo of orbital installations; communist Mars; utopian Edenist habitats mining helium-3 fusion fuel from gas-giant planets; quirkily various colony worlds; and the mysterious alien wreckage of the Ruin Ring.

The Handbook carefully, almost too carefully, avoids spoiler revelations about the apocalyptic action of Night's Dawn. As in those books, its Timeline stops before the main story begins, and--besides names of "Possessors" in a cast list slightly updated from The Naked God's--the superpowered returned dead who threaten the entire Federation aren't mentioned at all. Readers nervous of SF terminology may find this a useful guide to the trilogy's huge, exhilarating blend of roller-coaster action and ghost-train chills. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The essential companion and guide to the diverse elements of the massive universe Peter F. Hamilton created in his awesome 'Night's Dawn Trilogy'.

The Reality Dysfunction ... The Neutronium Alchemist ... The Naked God Peter F.Hamilton's 'Night's Dawn Trilogy' has proved one of the best-selling Science-Fiction series of the last decade, and the most dramatically successful from a UK author.This handbook is an essential companion volume for all the countless readers past, present and future for whom this massive trilogy has evolved into a defining SF classic. It comprises general background information relating to all three volumes, with comprehensive notes and glossaries on the major characters, planets, space stations, political hierarchies, weaponry, spacecraft, invasions, and the many alien races with their diverse social economies, industries and technologies. 'From the outset, Hamilton won over the sci-fi aficionados with the coherence of his invented universe' The Times

Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland in 1960, and still lives near Rutland Water with his wife and daughter. 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 previous novels include the Greg Mandel series: Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower and the 'Night's Dawn' trilogy: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God, which established him as Britain's bestselling writer of science fiction and a major name in global science fiction writing. In recent years his 'Commonwealth Saga', which consists of the novels Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained has reaffirmed in standing in the world of science fiction. His twelve novels and one handbook (a vital guide to the 'Night's Dawn' trilogy) have sold well over two million copies worldwide.