Fallen Dragon
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4.3 • 78 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Born in a colony world in 2310, Lawrence Newton hankered after the golden era of starships exploring the galaxy. But the age of human starflight was drawing to a close... Twenty years later, he's the sergeant of a washed-out platoon taking part in the bungled invasion of another world. The giant corporations who own the remaining starships euphemistically call such campaigns "asset realisation". In practice, it's simple piracy.
But while he's on the ground being attacked by disturbingly effective resistance forces, Lawrence hears stories about the Temple of the Fallen Dragon-the holy place of a sect devoted to the worship of a mythical creature. Its priests are said to guard treasure large enough to buy lifelong happiness for any man, prompting him to mount an enterprise of his own...
PRAISE FOR PETER F. HAMILTON
"Absolutely vintage science fiction. Hamilton puts British sci-fi back into interstellar overdrive" The Times
"The most powerful imagination in science fiction" Ken Follett
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This hefty novel of interstellar war and alien contact in the 25th century, a sort of Starship Troopers as if written by Charles Dickens, ranks as one of Hamilton's best. Though he's a mercenary for the Zantiu-Braun corporation, which gets its profits by periodically looting old interstellar colonies, Lawrence Newton has his eye on picking up a treasure trove of alien technology noton his employer's approved list of loot. When the Zantiu-Braun Third Fleet descends on the planet Thrallspring, the invaders unexpectedly find the inhabitants, who have access to some of that lost alien technology, prepared to fight back. After several hundred pages of well-depicted action and intrigue, the technology of the "dragons" makes the war superfluous, a definite victory for all opponents of the corporate pirates. It also makes it possible for Newton himself to travel in both time and space, and to put right the mishandling of a youthful love affair that forced him into exile in the first place. Ignoring conventional wisdom about expository lumps, flashbacks and viewpoint shifts, Hamilton (The Reality Dysfunction) nicely develops character while he also does some fine world building that's as good as it gets in space opera short of Lois McMaster Bujold. Despite the somewhat uneven pacing, the book is undeniably a page-turner and should provide many absorbing hours for the author's existing readers as well as a salutary introduction to a major SF author for a new audience.
