Describe About Books A Second Chance at Eden (Confederation Universe)

Title	:	A Second Chance at Eden (Confederation Universe)
Author	:	Peter F. Hamilton
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 432 pages
Published	:	January 1st 1999 by Aspect (first published October 9th 1998)
Categories	:	Science Fiction. Fiction. Short Stories

A Second Chance at Eden (Confederation Universe) Paperback | Pages: 432 pages

Narrative Concering Books A Second Chance at Eden (Confederation Universe)

This is a collection of six short stories and a novella taking place in the Night's Dawn universe before the events of the main trilogy took place. To be fair I need to say "Peter F. Hamilton" and "short" do not belong to the same sentence - the guy does not know the meaning of the word. Thus these allegedly not very long stories are not exactly short, but they are not big enough to qualify for novellas status.

According to the author himself his editor suggested to write a big novel encompassing the stories below. Hamilton delivered: he brought a 1000+ page manuscript of the first book of the trilogy and the rest is history - the best contemporary space opera writer was born. The stories themselves follow:

Sonnie's Edge. Who would not want to see a live fight between giant robots? In the future people learned how to create any biologic life form linked to a human pilot who guides it. As you can imagine this is even more exciting than giant robots (King Kong vs. Godzilla, anybody?)

The only problem for young and talented people who decided to be a part of the fun turned out to be the same corruption as was present in professional boxing not long ago.

A Second Chance at Eden. The novella. Somebody killed a leading scientist on Eden. That place contained only people with affinity ability - this means among other things they cannot hide their thoughts from the collective consciousness. Nobody had a clue about the villain. Freshly arrived new chief of security (affinity-free) had fun trying to untangle an impossible murder.

This is one of the few stories that add something meaningful to the main trilogy. We get to meet Wing-Tsit Chong while he was alive; we only see his legacy later.

New Days Old Times. A look at one of the colony planet, similar to infamous Lalonde, or even better - Norfolk. The colonies are brand sparkling new, but the same prejudices remain.

Candy Buds. Two orphan kids ended up being owners and operators of a biological machine capable of creating candies giving people dreams of exotic and beautiful places. Understandably the local Godfather who ruthlessly weeded out the competition wants this. What he wants, he gets. Do not think you know how this will end as a very much unexpected plot twist at the end takes care of destroying all expectations.

Deathday. Another colony; this one is definitely Lalonde of the past. It has its own disaster, but nowhere close to Lalonde's devastating effect. One survivor is out for revenge, but will he get it?

The Lives and Loves of Tiarella Rosa. This is the main reason the final rating of the book is 3 stars instead of 4. The MC is too creepy despite the author's attempt to show him a decent guy. Anyhow a terrorist organization got its greedy hands on some anti-matter. One of its member finally realized that it was all fun and games until somebody loses his finger and eloped with the acquired anti-matter hoping to lay low someplace and dispose of his deadly toy. He found a perfect escape on a remote island of a remote planet owned by a middle-aged woman. The guy managed to sleep with both her and her daughter creating lots of complications. Yes, Nabokov's Lolita instantly comes to mind.


Escape Route. Finally a story that directly relates to the trilogy. It is about an event often mentioned by Joshua Calvert in the main trilogy, namely: what the heck did his father do to his famous spaceship to leave it to his son in a very bad shape. Joshua remained clueless. You will not. Hint: this story reads like an opposite of Rendezvous with Rama.

This is as big spoiler as I am going to give.

The stories are good enough, but completely unnecessary for the understanding of the main trilogy. The creepy hero of The Lives and Loves of Tiarella Rosa prevented me from giving the book 4 stars - as I mentioned above.

Declare Books Toward A Second Chance at Eden (Confederation Universe)

Original Title:	A Second Chance at Eden
ISBN:	0446606715 (ISBN13: 9780446606714)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	Confederation Universe

Rating About Books A Second Chance at Eden (Confederation Universe)

Ratings: 4.03 From 4452 Users | 77 Reviews

Critique About Books A Second Chance at Eden (Confederation Universe)

A Second Chance at Eden is written by Peter F. Hamilton and is a compilation of 7 short stories. ISB number 978-0-330-35182-9, first published in 1998 by Mcmillan.According to the introduction of Hamilton, the stories of this collection are set in the universe of the Nights Dawn Trilogy. They form a series of snapshot glimpses into the history of the Confederation leading up to the time of Joshua Calvert and Quinn Dexter. According to Peter Hamilton, some stories are new and some have already

So, I've had these massive doorstep sized books: the The Night's Dawn Trilogy sat in a box in the attic for the longest time and I really enjoyed Fallen Dragon, and I'm ahead on my quota of books read for the year, and so I thought to myself that I have enough bandwidth to work my way through this epic and not fall behind on my overall books read count. But then I realise that there are 2 companion volumes, this being one and The Confederation Handbook being the other.I looked it up on the

Another amazing piece of Hamilton's infinite imagination. Or better said 7 amazing pieces - 3 of them are directly related to the Night's Dawn series (through events or characters), the others are just set in the same universe.Candy Buds was the seed from which emerged Night's Dawn, as Hamilton tells: "During the early nineties I wrote several short stories centered around the affinity technology. They didnt belong to any particular hard and fast version of future history, I was just interested

A captivating collection of short stories and novellas from the Confederation Universe. Very interesting to see how the concept of affinity and the impact on the culture changes and evolves over time. Hamilton plays expertly with science fiction tropes and twist and turns them in interesting, unusual ways without ever losing the human experience at its core.

This is a book of short stories aimed at providing the social and technological background of the The Night's Dawn trilogy. The stories stand well by themselves, although they are at different levels, thus I will provide my ratings for each one separately:Sonnie's Edge: 3/5An introductory story that indirectly describes the initial steps in the development of the bio technologies core to this fictional universe. As in most other stories, Sonnie's Edge applies the current human mentality and

The Night's Dawn universe is so rich that Hamilton likely has an unlimited number of possible stories he can set there. This collection of stories is laid out chronologically with some of them taking place at key historic moments that eventually led to the complex universe where the novels are set. It was nice to meet important historic characters such as Wing-Tsit Chong and Marcus Calvert. I also enjoyed that some of the stories targeted the pivotal periods and cultural upheavals over

The first short stories I've read by Hamilton and they just reinforced him as my favorite fiction author. He strikes the perfect balance between science, plot, characters, and setting for me. Space opera is my jam and Hamilton is my bread and butter.