The Dreaming Void

The Dreaming Void is a science fiction novel by the British writer Peter F. Hamilton, published in 2007. It is the first volume of a trilogy set in the same far future as his Commonwealth saga.

The year is 3589, fifteen hundred years after Commonwealth forces narrowly prevented human extinction in a war against an alien species called the Prime. The danger now is a threat to the existence of the universe: at the heart of the galaxy is the Void, a self-contained microuniverse that cannot be breached, cannot be destroyed and cannot be stopped from expanding in every direction, taking planets, stars and civilisations with it.

The Void has existed for millions of years. Even the oldest and most technologically advanced of the galaxy's sentient races, the Raiel, do not know where it came from, who made it or what it is for. Then Inigo, an astrophysicist who studies it, starts dreaming of human beings who live inside it, and his dreams describe a world in which thoughts become actions and dreams become reality, and in which the people inside the Void have found a kind of paradise. What the dreams are, and what they mean for everyone outside, is the question the trilogy is built on.