Name: Fallen Dragon
ISBN: 9780330480062

Peter F. Hamilton

In this space adventure, Lawrence Newton, the sergeant of a washed-out platoon, sets out on a private-enterprise operation in search of the Temple of the Fallen Dragon, where its priests are said to guard a hoard of treasure large enough to buy lifelong happiness.

Fallen Dragon

Gavin

Mixed. Twice as long as it should be; a lot of the ideological stuff is extremely clumsy; the protagonist isn't half as smart or decent as the book tries to make him seem. It gets to the main plot around 500 pages in(!) But some unusual virtues in here.

  he asked what had happened to their civilization, which had embraced over a thousand light-years. They smiled kindly at his lack of comprehension and told him they were done with it. Their battle for knowledge, they said, was won; they knew everything worth knowing. What they were, therefore, had no further purpose in the context of their achievement. They were now embarked on a completely different path of development, one last final application of their glorious heritage. Life itself would become pleasant and simple. Their bodies were modifying and adapting, melding to fit perfectly with a natural planetary environment. But unlike a primitive, pretechnology society, they would never starve or become ill, for this was a designed simplicity, taking advantage of everything their planet could provide. Their minds would quiet over the generations until the joy of a single sunset provided as much satisfaction as breaking down the barriers of space and time with the mental tools of mathematics and physics... closing themselves away from reality like a flower at the end of the day



The plot is premised on corporate freebooting: gunboat asset stripping. This always looks a bit silly (compare Morgan) but it's not historically implausible. The East India Companies did way worse things.

  I'm offering you virtual immortality lived as a plutocrat, and you're turning that down?



Newton gets a full novelworth of character development, alongside massive novellas for the Simons and Denise. His self-fulfilling teen self-ostracism is extremely well-drawn, as is the total kneejerk alignment of the young man in love ("He didn't mind anything she said or did").

  		"Why not just give them the classics like Pratchett and Tolkien?" 
"I don't think they're very relevant to today."


Besides that I suppose the only real achievement is humanising the villains. Even the worst of the evil corporates want great things - space exploration, humanity's transcendence. 

  Our nonreturn would damage Zantiu-Braun's interstellar operations permanently, possibly even to the point of shutting them down. That would be a catastrophe we cannot permit to happen


Their method - open plutocracy with property rights the only rights - is where the evil comes in. Even then, they are heavily constrained by decency and public opinion. In passing Hamilton notes that the corp regenerated the Great Barrier Reef pro bono.

The oozing and peristaltic supersoldiers are very distinctive, very gross. I doubt their suits being biological makes a lick of sense.

  You gave me a piece of a fucking animal to eat, and you ask me what the fucking matter is. An animal! A living creature. You're fucking crazy, that's my problem... He's eating fruit. Real fruit. Off a bush. They're all bloody Regressors



Hamilton uses one of my least favourite tropes: the black-market hacking tool which is freely* available and cracks milspec things effortlessly, but which the military fails to adopt.

(view spoiler)[Didn't like the alien. He actually rushed it, the important bit. And the title is laughable in hindsight. (hide spoiler)]

Skipped most of the flashbacks.

Martin Weitzel

Mrigank

Scordatura

Peter Tving

Colin O'Brien

Tara King

Spaceghost 

Jeff Byrnes

In the distant future, corporations have become sustainable communities with their own militaries, and corporate goals have essentially replaced political ideology. On a youthful, rebellious impulse, Lawrence joined the military of a corporation that he now recognizes to be ruthless and exploitative. His only hope for escape is to earn enough money to buy his place in a better corporation. When his platoon is sent to a distant colony to quell a local resistance effort, it seems like a stroke of amazing fortune, and Lawrence plans to rob the colony of their fabled gemstone, the Fallen Dragon, to get the money he needs. However, he soon discovers that the Fallen Dragon is not a gemstone at all, but an alien life form that the local colonists have been protecting since it crashed in their area. Now, Lawrence has to decide if he will steal the alien to exploit the use of its inherent biotechnical processes -- which far exceed anything humans are capable of -- or if he will help the Resistance get the alien home.

Carlo Zottmann

Jesper Bylund

In a future where corporations have their own militaries, a platoon is sent to the colony where the fabled Fallen Dragon resides. Protected by the colonists, the alien life form becomes the catalyst of an interstellar war.