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Misspent Youth [Unabridged] (Paperback)

by Peter F Hamilton (Author)
2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
Price: £5.96 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Frequently Bought Together

Misspent Youth + Judas Unchained: Part Two of the Commonwealth Saga + Pandora's Star: Part One of the Commonwealth Saga
Total RRP: £25.97
Price For All Three: £16.72

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Product details

  • Paperback: 600 pages
  • Publisher: Pan; 3 edition (19 Jan 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330480227
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330480222
  • Product Dimensions: 17.7 x 11.1 x 2.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 189,454 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Peter Hamilton is famed for SF blockbusters of far-future interstellar adventure. By contrast Misspent Youth is a social comedy set in the year 2040 in England. When gene therapy rewinds Jeff Baker's age back to his early 20s he finds that wisdom and experience are no match for hormones...

The rejuvenation treatment, developed by federal Europe to impress laggard America, is so complex and expensive that only one person every 18 months can receive it. Jeff is the first because he's a celebrity inventor, father of the "datasphere" which superseded the Internet.

Family upheavals follow. An "arrangement" with his much younger, still beautiful wife Sue lets her enjoy lovers while the aged Jeff turns a blind eye: now things are different. Meanwhile their 18-year-old son Tim is struggling ineptly with teenage sexual pangs and the impossibility of understanding girls. All part of growing up, but Jeff's renewed youth brings farcical complications.

It's not just that Jeff now fancies Sue again. He can't resist even younger women. An early one-night stand is publicised all over the datasphere. Embarrassment escalates when he's seduced by the granddaughter of a long-time pub companion. Worse, several of Tim's ravishing female schoolmates are interested in Jeff the celebrity stud. The dishiest of all is Tim's latest, most hopelessly adoring girlfriend.

Can it be coincidence that the action mostly happens in Rutland?

This comedy of embarrassments and revelations has a darker background: Europe is plagued by separatist movements whose terrorist habits make the old IRA look like pussycats. The turning point in Jeff's tangled relationships comes when he attends a London conference surrounded by protest that breeds riot--with Tim among the protesters.

A foreshadowed twist leads to a finale that mixes cynicism with sentiment. En route Misspent Youth is a lot of fun. --David Langford --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

From the talented Hamilton, a provocative look at the days not too long after tomorrow. It is 40 years into the future and, following decades of research on genetics, Europe is finally in a position to rejuvenate a human being. The first subject for treatment is chosen: Jeff Baker, the father of the datasphere (which replaced the Internet) and philanthropist extraordinaire. After 18 months in a German medical facility, the 78-year-old patient returns home looking like a healthy 20-year-old. Misspent Youth follows the effect his reappearance has on his family and also on his long-term pals who are now all pensioners, and starting to resent what Jeff has become. Standing quite apart from his previous novels, a very welcome new SF outing by a British leader of the field.
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Customer Reviews

41 Reviews
5 star:
 (2)
4 star:
 (6)
3 star:
 (5)
2 star:
 (14)
1 star:
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Average Customer Review
2.2 out of 5 stars (41 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Wrong Book Classification, 15 Aug 2003
By A Customer
Classifying this book as science fiction would seem to be against the Trade Descriptions act. It would seem to belong in a genre that has more to do with xenophobic old men's sexual fantasies. I had read and enjoyed all of Peter Hamilton's books up to this one. His usual story telling style was absent. No captivating threading of the story and no substance to the story by the way of clever science fiction props and setting. Right up to the end I kept hoping the story would get going but it just didn't. Very disappointing but I'll allow him this one based on past performance.
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Misspent £6.99, 14 Sep 2003
By A Customer
This is one of the worst books I have read all the way through in a long time. In a perverse way that's a compliment to the author: it was only my faith in Peter F. Hamilton from my enjoyment of his previous books that kept me going.
I've read and enjoyed the rest of Peter F. Hamilton's output, starting with the epic space opera of the Night's Dawn trilogy and working back through the near-future Greg Mandel series. Most recently Hamilton returned to space opera with the excellent Fallen Dragon.
Misspent Youth is set around 40 years in the future. Septuagenarian Jeff Baker, inventor of the "Datasphere" which replaced the Internet, has been chosen as the first recipient of a rejuvenation treatment. The book tells the story of his return after an 18 month hospital stay as a newly-invigorated 20 year old.
An interesting premise, I suppose, though not exactly a novel one (I couldn't help remembering "I Will Fear No Evil" by Robert Heinlein). But that's about as far as it goes. Hamilton seems to have no clue how to take that theme and turn it into something interesting. We have a set of dull characters (Jeff himself, his teenage son Tim, a gaggle of Tim's schoolfriends and various of Jeff's friends and family) to which basically nothing happens. Nothing. For 439 pages. The tedium is indescribable.
All right, there is a bit of action. Jeff's newly-regenerated nadgers mean he's a sex-crazed teenager with the mind of a dirty old man. So the main suspense in the book is whether he'll be able to get two of Tim's girlfriends into bed at once. (I'll save you the trouble - he does). While there is apparently a lot of sex in this book, it's long on teenage wish-fulfilment and short on detail.
It is hard to feel sympathy or even interest in any of the characters in this book. We don't get inside their heads and the only motivation is teenage lust. The female characters are particularly wooden. Tim's female schoolfriends are distinguishable only by breast size (Annabelle, let's see - ah yes, she's the one with "tits like melons", isn't she?)
Not only are plot and characters deficient, but Hamilton's futurology is pretty suspect too. For example, Jeff's world-changing invention was a memory storage module which changed the world and destroyed the publishing industry. It's pretty obvious from today's post-Napster world that it is bandwidth, not memory, which is the determining factor in file copying. Another howler talks about how easy is was for Britain to rejuvenate its railway infrastructure by reversing the Beeching cuts. Hamilton is quite willing to share his ignorance of science, technology and economics. For a "hard" science fiction writer - and one whose future vision is normally quite compelling - this is pretty shameless behaviour.
The word count is just staggering for a story in which so little happens. The action such as it is could have been edited down to perhaps one quarter of the book's length. It is padded out with turgid, mundane descriptions (do we really need to know exactly how Jeff cooks barbecue food, with his "oversize tongs"?). Is Hamilton being paid by the word perhaps?
There's a twist ending, of course, which is telegraphed clearly about 150 pages out and salvages little as the book builds to a crescendo of banality.
Misspent Youth is in a different league than Hamilton's earlier books, and it ain't the Premiership. I find it impossible to believe that this is truly a recent novel from a writer who otherwise seems to have been getting better and better. I can only assume that this is a piece of juvenilia, written probably at the beginning of his career in the late 1980's, and hastily dressed up for publication on the back of his recent successes. That's a shoddy trick on the part of both author and publisher. No one would have published this drivel had it been a first novel by an unknown author, so as a loyal fan of Peter F. Hamilton I am being taken for a ride.
Well, I fell for it. At least I didn't buy the hardback...
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars A real stinker!!!!, 20 Sep 2003
By Theriex (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews
I'm just going to make this short to save you the trouble:

If you read the night's dawn trilogy and thought Mr Hamilton was a pretty good writer, I would strongly advise you to not read the utter waste of paper that "Misspent Youth" is...

It's shock full of sex-fueled-teenage-angst-soap-opera-isms and (regrettably) very short on actual content...

Plese, if you will, stay very, very far away from this travesty...

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Dorian Grey?
I can't quite work out why this novel doesn't work. It doesn't. That is clear. I find it quite surprising that Hamilton, having successfully produced two really good trilogies,... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Rod Williams

1.0 out of 5 stars Utter garbage
Easily the worst book I read in 2008.

Peter F Hamilton does have some writing skills - he's good at describing hard sf, tactical battles and continually raising the... Read more
Published 12 months ago by P. Kay

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent setting, but the characters can be a let down
Jeff Baker is the creator of the ultimate storage device, the memory crystal. Able to hold masses of information, it has caused the downfall of copyright: everything is now public... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Mark Chitty

3.0 out of 5 stars His weakest novel by far, but not entirely without merit.
Misspent Youth is the eighth novel by British SF author Peter F. Hamilton, originally published in 2002. Read more
Published 17 months ago by A. Whitehead

1.0 out of 5 stars how much sex could a old man have after a rejuvenation?
This book explores the idea of what an old man could do if he was rejuvenated. The main character in this book spends his time having sex with young girls, and not any young... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Hugo Berg Otterlei

4.0 out of 5 stars B- Has done better.
Compared to Hamiltons other books this one is definately lightweight, but for all that it's a pretty good, and certainly an easy, read. Read more
Published 20 months ago by starfiend

2.0 out of 5 stars REALLY REALLY DULL!
This isn't a very bad book which is why I have not given it 1 star, also the fact that Hamilton remains one of my favorite authors has something to do with it. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Andrew Byrne

1.0 out of 5 stars Utter trash
If you are expecting a book in the same vein as the rest of Hamilton's oeuvre then you will be sorely disappointed. Read more
Published on 14 Aug 2007 by A. Riches

1.0 out of 5 stars Bold and the Beautiful 2040
I didn't care for any of the characters in this book. Jeff is deplorable and I only read to the last page in vain hope that he would be killed off in a painful death, of which he... Read more
Published on 4 Aug 2007 by D. K. Howes

5.0 out of 5 stars Great new future yarn - with political overtones
Not a typical Hamilton book. Set in the very near future in a UK locked into the sort of tyranical European Union nation that looks all too likely if you take a long hard look at... Read more
Published on 20 Jun 2006 by Michael Wigley

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