Peter F Hamilton - Commonwealth Saga

[HereComesPete]

Wiki says

Misspent Youth - lists this as standalone instead of part of a trilogy.

Pandora's Star.
Judas Unchained.

Then the void trilogy.

[spoodie]

Now I've been reminded of the Saga I'm thinking about how good it is. WTB Dudley Bose motile action figure.

[HereComesPete]

Bose was such a twat, I imagine him being assimilated in a borg/district 9 kind of way.

[Roman Totale]

It would appear I bought Pandora's Start ages ago but lost it under a pile of other things to read - now it's back at the top. Rah!

[FatherJack]

Wiki says

Misspent Youth - lists this as standalone

Wiki hasn't read them then. It might not be part of a trilogy, but it's the same universe, just much earlier. 'Standalone' implies to me a different setting, universe and characters.

Misspent Youth is set closer to our time when the first human gets rejuved. While the story is all about him, one character does make a very brief cameo in a later book. I wouldn't say it's essential reading to complete the series, but it does give you a personal view on the rejuve process, which is a matter-of-fact thing in the later books. The information storage technique the main character has invented also makes a lot of the later technology possible, I think the unisphere and sentient AI you'll know from the later books are just getting started.

The Commonwealth Saga is set 300 years later and does pretty well at explaining as it goes about what's changed in the meantime - taking that inital idea of body modification/eternal youth and building on it/discussing it. What would happen if no-one dies, do we become careless, must we expand to new worlds, are there whole cities/worlds of 'related' people, have people modified themselves as weapons etc. It also introduces a bunch of new ideas of course, like wormholes, removable memory storage of your brain - and goes on to develop those ideas and how they change culture - do we bother developing space flight when we have wormholes, do we still have wars when no-one can die?

The Void trilogy is 1000 years later still, and most of that technology is old hat. A lot of characters return, but don't seem to have changed much. There are still a load of new ideas, though things have stagnated a little, but the events which unfold are a kick up the arse in the same way the Primes were.

I read an insightful comment in a review of another of Hamilton's books, that he's made the transition from "new sci-fi author" to "best-selling author" by modifying some of his existing/earlier ideas for separate stories in order to put them in the same universe as existing successful titles, and would guess that the Dream sections of Void would match that description. I enjoyed them immensly though, and am glad they were included.