The world of Peter F. Hamilton's "Fallen Dragon"

[FTeik]

The world of „Fallen Dragon“ (novel by Peter F. Hamilton)

Browsing through my bookshelf recently I stumbled over this novel from 2001. Its been a while since I’ve read it the last time and I mostly remember putting it on the shelf with somewhat ambivalent feelings in regards to the character-arc of the main protagonist, but also the larger world it depicts:

The setting is the 24th century. For close to three centuries the exploration and colonization of space has been in the hands of large companies. However those efforts are winding down, because those colonies are huge money-dumps. Not only are the costs of shipping enough material to have viable colonies enormous, the habitable worlds alien biospheres have to be laboriously terraformed, too.

Also because the available FTL-drive is slow as hell (travel-times take weeks, if not months) and because of the transportation-costs the shipping of goods isn’t profitable. The colonies are also incapable of competing with the industrial resource- and research-base of earth, meaning the products they can produce aren’t competitive. Which means the parent-companies of the colonies and their shareholders on earth never see a return on their investments. Consequently many of those companies have gone bankrupt and their stocks and the rights to their colonies have been bought up by other companies.

At the time of the story Zantui-Braun is the last company, that has a significant space-program and is still establishing colonies (although along a different model, once the colony-ships have left earth, they are on their own).

To finance/sustain their continued colonization-efforts (and to give as many people as possible the chance for a new start) Zantui-Braun undertakes “profit-realisation-campaigns”. In regular intervals they visit the colonies they acquired the rights to (cheaply bought from the bankrupt assets of their parent-companies), land occupation-troops and confiscate/plunder everything valuable enough to be transported back to earth and sold there. In “exchange” they leave knowledge and data about the newest scientific discoveries behind, so the colonists can modernize their industries.
The colonists, of course, aren't happy about this and try to resist more or less successfully. Considering their "dream of the middle-class life" was financed by people back on earth, who never saw much ROI and the plundering of the colonies is intended to establish other new colonies (giving other people the same chance) my sympathies for the resistance-efforts are somewhat limited, but I can also understand the anger.

So , while this scenario isn’t as bleak as some outright dystopias, I also don’t think It to be very inspiring (although it is a lot more thought-inspiring than the typical pew-pew of many SF-stories).

Thoughts?

[Vendetta]

I only read the book a million years ago when it came out, but I did think it was a bit silly that interstellar colonisation is amazingly expensive and yet interstellar invasion of a colony is so cheap that you can reliably make good on those debts even after covering the cost of doing it.

[FTeik]

I only read the book a million years ago when it came out, but I did think it was a bit silly that interstellar colonisation is amazingly expensive and yet interstellar invasion of a colony is so cheap that you can reliably make good on those debts even after covering the cost of doing it.

First, thank you for commenting at all.

Second, the way I understood it, the profits form the invasion(s) were small by comparison and were getting smaller, so the invasions would have come to an end sooner or later (a point of concern for the protagonist was, that the current invasion-fleet he was on consisted of only seven ships, when years prior there had been thirty) and the companies doing those mission never expected to "make good on the debts", but did them for additional income (otherwise they could have written them out of their balance-sheets completely).

[Vendetta]

Yeah, but they were getting smaller and less effective because the remaining unplundered colonies were getting better and better at resisting them as they closed the technological gap, not because the venture was inherently unprofitable.


Really though, the world of Fallen Dragon isn't much of a focus which is more on whatsisface learning the errors of his life and going and getting a second chance at being young (and ending up having a creepy paedo relationship with his childhood girlfriend when he makes himself a copy of his younger body and goes back in time). Which is also a significant element of Hamilton's following book (which I haven't read), though maybe not with the creepy relationship thing. (though probabaly, because it's not uncommon in his books, see: Mindstar trilogy).



The core concept of the cost of interstellar colonisation shaping interstellar society is better presented in Neptune's Brood, because there it actually is relevant to the story (albeit in that case it's a society with nothing even near lightspeed other than communication lasers) not just an excuse to bring a character back "home" as an adult.