Confederation Universe

In the twenty-seventh century humanity has spilled across nearly nine hundred star systems and calls the loose weave that binds them the Confederation. Then, on a raw frontier world, something tears — and the dead come back, crowding out of the void beyond death to wear the living like stolen coats. This is the universe of Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn: a baroque, planet-spanning space opera in which the oldest human terror puts on the newest technology. Its spine is a single vast trilogy — The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, The Naked God — each volume long enough that its paperback edition splits in two. Around that spine, the collection A Second Chance at Eden gathers shorter tales reaching back to the first living habitat and the birth of the gene called affinity, while The Confederation Handbook lays the setting bare for those who want the machinery. Two branches of humankind share the stage: technology-bound Adamists, and the Edenists, who grow sentient bitek habitats and voidhawk starships and pour their dead into a shared, remembering multiplicity. Hamilton writes big. Dozens of viewpoints — a chancer starship captain, an Edenist pilot bonded to her living ship, a resurrected Al Capone rebuilding an empire from stolen bodies — run in parallel across hundreds of pages before they converge. Expect hard-SF hardware and cosmic dread in the same breath, and sprawl embraced rather than apologised for. Begin at the beginning: The Reality Dysfunction opens the door, and everything that follows walks through it.