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 Jeff is the first because he's a celebrity inventor, father of the "datasphere" which superseded the Internet.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
Review
In such books as The Reality Dysfunction and The Neutronium Alchemist, Peter Hamilton has long combined considerable skills in the field of science fiction with no mean commercial success. Like Paul McCauley, Greg Benford and a few other writers, Hamilton is able to transport the reader into exhilarating new worlds - while at the same time creating realistic characters and keeping our brains in top gear. This is one of his most impressive pieces yet, with a salutary journey into the near future that is both illuminating and unsettling. The theme is an extremely topical one: genetic research has moved on apace after the next half-century, and the total rejuvenation of a human being is in the offing. Who would not jump at the chance of a new, youthful body? Jeff Baker, who invented the system that superseded the Internet, is to be the first lucky beneficiary. Baker welcomes his transformation from senior citizen to the physical state of a young man just out of his teens, but after the initial euphoria, myriad problems of adjustment set in. The effects on Baker's family, pensioner friends and society in general are much greater than he anticipated, and soon he is wondering about the wisdom of his challenging of nature. This is intelligent science fiction of the first order, with a plausible and involving narrative that makes the futuristic concepts all too believable. How long before the events of Misspent Youth are science fact? (Kirkus UK)
Terse - for Hamilton (The Dreaming Void, 2008, etc.) - yarn, first published in the United Kingdom in 2002, about rejuvenation and its consequences.Half a century hence, GM crops - and weeds - cover the English countryside; the omnipresent datasphere, which physicist Jeff Baker's invention of a memory crystal made possible, and, incidentally, sounded the death knell for intellectual property rights, has replaced the Internet. Jeff literally gave his billion-dollar idea away free but still managed to make vast amounts of money. He's now a creaky 78, with a marriage of convenience to much younger ex-model Sue and a son, Tim, by artificial insemination. So, in the hope that he can do for room-temperature superconductors what he did for computing, and also to further the career of ambitious politico Rob Lacey, Jeff receives a full rejuvenation treatment. The drawback: Due to the threat of English nationalist terrorists, the family must be closely guarded by heavy-handed Euro-cops. Reborn in a 20-year-old body, Jeff rediscovers sex, first with a surprised and delighted Sue, then with almost any warm, attractive and willing body - as high-schooler Tim, lusting after his stunning and well-endowed classmate, Annabelle, discovers all too soon. Jeff, meanwhile, finds that his old friends have turned into dinosaurs. To sustain his sexual appetite, he starts popping Viagra by the handful, and only incidentally begins to notice he's destroying his marriage and his son. Unfortunately, Jeff fails to convince as an old head on a young body, and the stridently anti-European subtext poisons the entire enterprise.Flowers for Algernon, centering on sex instead of brains. (Kirkus Reviews)
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by Peter F. Hamilton
by Peter F. Hamilton
by Peter F. Hamilton
by Peter F. Hamilton
by Peter F. Hamilton
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