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:
“I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to
me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined
toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I
was happy.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and is an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)