2010-10-07 » Ideas from The Commonwealth Universe
I finished reading “The Evolutionary Void” by Peter F. Hamilton last week. That’s the 3rd book in “The Void Trilogy” and the 5th book I’ve read that takes place in his Commonwealth Universe. These books have a lot of interesting stuff going on so I thought I’d write a quick summary of some cool things they contain. WARNING: This may contain some spoilers, but I’ll try not to give too much of the story away. I’m just going to list some of the cool technology.
First off, don’t get anywhere near the end of Pandora’s Star without having a copy of Judas Unchained handy. Similarly, don’t get near the end either of the first two books in The Void Trilogy without having the next ready. One thing about these books is that I really don’t think they stand alone very well. The story really doesn’t finish and this is really just 2 books split into 5 volumes if you ask me.
With that out of the way, let me say something about what interests me in SciFi in general. If you look at my books page you’ll see I’ve got a lot of SciFi on there. One of the things I like most about SciFi is all the really cool concepts that good SciFi writers come up with. Placing characters alternate universes surrounded by amazing things often leads to really interesting stories which focus on the relationship with technology and societal issues that result. In the 5 books I read that happen in this universe, there were (off the top of my head):
- planet sized AIs
- artificial wormholes
- artificial black holes
- FTL starships
- weapons capable of destroying stars
- personal force fields
- engineering projects on a interstellar scale
- inter-planetary government spanning hundreds of light-years
- memory stores (and ability to copy memories to a new body)
- bionic enhancements
- “distributed humans” with multiple bodies
- alien races millions of years old
- “post-physical” beings
and lots of other cool tech that I’m not even thinking of right now.
Being a geek and spending a lot of time thinking about technology and the future, I’m always interested in having more ideas to play with. While these ideas might seem pretty far-fetched right now, (part of what makes them exciting!) it is important to remember that the idea of going to space at all was once crazy. Now we have people in space all the time and “private companies working on spaceflight”. Phones today have more power than computers did even 10 years ago with much smaller footprints. The human genome has mostly been mapped. And there are advances happening all over the place. It’s an exciting time to live in and the future has potential to be pretty cool too. As long as the use of these technologies for evil stays a plot device.