British author Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy consists of three science fiction novels: The Reality Dysfunction (1996), The Neutronium Alchemist (1997), and The Naked God (1999). A collection of short stories, A Second Chance at Eden, shares the same universe, and The Confederation Handbook documents that universe in non-fiction style.
The sprawling narrative deals with a far future where humanity struggles and wages war against past souls flooding back into the land of the living via possession (Al Capone and Fletcher Christian are among the returnees). Hamilton's future is expansive and primarily optimistic, with huge sentient space-cities that can closely resemble a natural Eden. He extrapolates on current trends concerning the blurring of technology with biology, and environmental devastation. But Hamilton pulls no punches on humanity's darker side. Poverty, sexual exploitation and cruelty still dog our civilizations in Night's Dawn, and the coalition opposing the Possessed are faced with a particularly cruel moral conundrum: they cannot destroy them without also killing their host bodies.
Read more about The Night's Dawn Trilogy: Humanity in The 27th Century, Story, Themes
Famous quotes containing the words night and/or dawn:
“That night was the turning-point in the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some imaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn,
Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)