Tordotcom Light Chaser

This was an excellent peter f hamiltion book, a bit small but still very enjoyableI cannot get enough of peter f hamilton!and I will be checking out the co-authors books as well as I enjoyed his writing style

Science fiction is a funny, weird genre (go figure). Some of the best sf stories are told with emphasis on their characters and on character development. It's not unusual to talk to fans who will say that they "want more stories about character X" because they fell in love with that character. It's also not unusual to talk to fans who love stories that are built around interesting ideas; and really, that's how the genre started in the first place. Science fiction was the genre of fantastic ideas, of the sense of wonder that people get from stories that contain wild, outside the box ideas. Many people like one type of story over another, and that's okay. Others like stories that have both great character development and wild ideas that generate a sense of wonder. That's okay too.But here's another oddball one. Peter F. Hamilton, one of the great space opera writers of our time, who has so many wonderful ideas running through his novels that it's impossible to write them in anything less than the length of War and Peace, is a collaborator on a novella, of all lengths, which contains some pretty spectacular ideas. The thing is, the novellas is actually the right length for the story. How does THAT happen? To be fair, I've never read anything by Gareth L. Powell before, but I'll bet he at least had something to do with the cat being in the story.While there really is only one main character, Amahle, there isn't much time for the full character development that many people like to see. And yet, I think we see enough to get a feel for her motivations as we move through the story. Amahle is a Light Chaser, an explorer who travels from planet to planet in the universe - and it's not clear whether all her stops are within the same galaxy or not - alone except for an onboard AI traveling companion, trading baubles and trinkets for life stories. She makes her stops throughout The Domain. At the end of her round trip cycle, she turns in the memories (stored on a kind of necklace) in exchange for more baubles, and goes back out on the trip again. She is revered where ever she goes; she is remembered by each of the civilizations she visits. All are interested in making sure she gets the memories she asked for so they can get the trinkets she gives in return.Yet, something is amiss.She gets bored on her journeys, so she views the memories that have been handed in to her. There is a voice, a person, who is telling her that something is wrong. It seems to be the same person, but from different times and different places. This person knows her, and knows that she can do something about what is wrong. She is warned not to trust her AI. And as she puts all the stories together, she realizes that something is indeed wrong, and that she can and should do something about it, for the future of humanity is at stake.Which brings us to the beginning of the book.Okay, that's not fair, but really the rest of the book sets up the beginning, which is the result of everything that has transpired in the rest of the story. We don't know what hits us at first, but as the story continues we do come to realize that the beginning is the culmination of the rest of it. Granted, this is not a new storytelling method, but in this case it is very compelling.Hamilton and Powell pack a lot into this novella. There is no extra fluff here. Everything counts, and everything matters. And it's all good, even great. This will be on my Hugo nomination ballot for Chicago next year. That's about as high a recommendation as I can make.

An interesting read. A new universe and intriguing plot from Peter Hamilton. However, it gets over very quickly. Readers used to large trilogies from the author will be disappointed with a short novella which can be read in a few hours.

It reads like a rough sketch of what was going to be a novel, but they maybe just moved onto other projects so didn’t bother adding the flesh to the bones. Large font used to pad it out. Expensive for a short story.

Enjoyed this story quite a bit. The protagonist is a woman who travels a circuit around the worlds of the "Human Domain" collecting stories and histories. She been genetically modified to be long lived and she's traveling at relativistic speeds between the worlds which means she only revisits worlds at most once a century. The plot comes into play when she starts looking at the stories from different worlds and starts seeing messages directed specifically to her from all sorts of unconnected people that tell her that the human race is in danger and she needs to do something about it.It's a short, quick read but I liked the science and the characters, I dinged it a star because the whole ultimate villain and their plot to doom the human race was pointlessly over convoluted and a more straightforward plot would have better served the story.