Pandora's Star

Rating:
Summary: The Payoff is worth the Perseverance
Review: Like other reviewers here, I felt that Pandora's Star tended to waffle and go off on tangents quite a lot but the last hundred pages more than justifies the early explorations of character and plot. It weaves complex threads but never becomes hard to follow or maintain an interest in. The characterizations are, as always with Hamilton, well crafted and very believable and the story is very strong. The setting does have a feel of some of his earlier space operas but the emphasis on longevity gives it a unique twist, especially as it seems to tie in with his previous [and less rewarding] novel, Misspent Youth. My biggest dissapointment is that I will have to wait for the conclusion of this fascinating saga.

Rating:
Summary: Don't be intimidated by the size -- this book flies!
Review: More B-movie sci-fi fun from Hamilton. Yes, the characters can be stereotypical and one dimensional. Yes, some of the dialogue is groan-inducing. Yes, it's sometimes longer than it has to be. So what? With freaky aliens, fleets of star ships, galactic space battles, giant robot attacks, even an autopsy on a living human written from the alien's perspective, sci-fi fans are 100% guaranteed a good time. Hamilton's imagination never dries up.

I thought the Night's Dawn Trilogy petered out after Reality Dysfunction, a novel Hamilton will be hard-pressed to top, but this one comes closer than anything else he's done. Fallen Dragon was just a teaser. Can't wait for part 2!

PS I wonder if Hamilton read Richard Morgan before he wrote this. His memorycells are a blatant theft of Morgan's cortical stacks, but we'll forgive him.

Rating:
Summary: Space Opera at its most extreme
Review: Most readers know Peter Hamilton from his Night's Dawn trilogy, published in this country in six volumes. Pandora's Star is the first volume in another sprawling (and I do mean sprawling) series. The book begins with the discovery that two distant linked solar systems have been isolated by a force field. Because the observation is made visually, this means that the event occurred hundred of years ago. This event leads the Commonwealth, an organization of the human planets, to investigate. Whoever could put a force field around such a tremendous area would be very possible. And what is the motive? Is the force field meant to keep others out, or those living in the system in?

In a break from Hamilton's early books, as Pandora's Star opens, humanity does not use star ships for faster than light travel. Rather, wormholes are used to link distant worlds. Thus, one of the first things that must be done is to build a ship capable of faster than light travel. Other aspects of Hamilton's future are near-immortality, a terrorist group obsessed with the idea that an alien has taken over the government, and various alien races that seem indifferent to human population, and whose motives are not apparent.

Those who've read Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy will not be surprised at his practice of introducing many characters and separate plot lines that will (one hopes) converge eventually. Some of these plots are so separate from the main plot as to seem to exist only to establish background of the characters. Indeed, at time the books seems to consist of short stories set in the same future but having no other connection. For example, we follow a police inspector investigating a 40 year old murder case relates to the main plot in a tangential (at best) way. This means that some of the characters can disappear for hundreds of pages at at time. While this can be irritating, the diversity of Hamilton's plotting makes it work for me. I much preferred this book to his last one, Fallen Dragon, which was (for Hamilton) quite focussed on mainly one character.

That Hamilton could produced two different but richly detailed visions of the future in Night's Dawn and Panddora's Star is very impressive. I hope he can keep this up.

I have one complaint about Hamilton's style that might strike others as pedantic but it drives me crazy. He consistently links independent clauses not with a conjunction, but a comma. To some extent this method duplicates the way people actually talk. However, he's been doing it from the beginning of his career, and having read thousands of pages of his, I am beginning to get tired of it.

Of course, it is hard to judge a trilogy by the first book. No matter how good it is, one's opinion of it will be affected by later installments. In Night's Dawn, Hamilton painted himself into a corner with his plot, and the ending was not entirely successful. Fallen Dragon's ending had even more of a deus ex machina quality. We'll have to see about this one. Pandora's Star ends with a huge cliffhanger that will have readers waiting for the next installment.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent...and I hated his last book.
Review: Pandora's Star has completely erased the bad taste Fallen Dragon left in my mouth. For a while there I was worried that my favorite author was slipping--Fallen Dragon really bored me. But Pandora's Star is that rare large novel where you look forward to the hefty unread portion with anticipation rather than wondering how much is filler.

If there's one word to describe this novel, it's "polished". Hamilton's writing has always been above the SF norm, but now his stuff just flows like mercury. Fans know he likes his techno talk, but even the most technical paragraphs unspool so precisely that I was confident I had their meaning in one pass every time. You could maybe beat that with a direct synaptic hookup, but just maybe.

This is a somewhate relaxed book--but a good, page-turning kind of relaxed. Hamilton takes you on a tour of about a dozen worlds and the plot threads often take a back seat to just plain exploring. But with worlds and characters this interesting I'm more than happy to sign up for the ride.

Also, anyone who enjoyed Greg Bear's "Queen of Angels" will like this one. One of the main characters, a female police investigator, is very reminiscent of the lead character in Bear's novel. Perhaps "inspired by" would be more accurate. That or it's an incredible coincidence. Either way she's a great character and Hamilton takes her in enough new directions to avoid being derivative.

Rating:
Summary: An Bleeding Edge Space Opera
Review: Pandora's Star is the first novel in the Commonwealth Saga duology. Sometime in the near future, after many delays, America sent the first expedition to Mars, only to find an Englishman waiting for them outside the interface to the world's first artificial wormhole. Compressed Space Transport, the company built to exploit the new technology, became the basis for the Commonwealth, which by 2380 AD has expanded to roughly four hundred lightyears in diameter.

The Commonwealth has found various sentient species among the stars and has both diplomatic and commercial relationships with two starfaring species. The Silfen look like elves, talk in riddles, and supposedly have non-mechanistic pathways among the stars. The High Angel is an artificial sentient controlling a monstrous spaceship, probably with FTL capabilities, that has outriders containing cities full of various alien species apparently collected along the way.

In this novel, Dudley Bose discovers that Dyson Alpha, one of a pair of stars surrounded by Dyson spheres, was enclosed in less than a second. Former speculations about the pair assumed a material enclosure, but only a force field could have been erected in that elapsed time. Since the stars are far outside the reach of the current CST network, the Commonwealth decides to build a spaceship with its own wormhole generator to go out and investigate the anomaly.

The Guardians of Selfhood are a militant group that are waging a war against the Starflyer, an alien that they believe traveled in the vacant arkship found on the planet Far Away. Bradley Johansson, the founder of the Guardians, has stated that the Starflyer controls the minds of the personnel of the Research Institute that is examining the arkship and that the alien has long since moved into human space to influence the public through its dupes and slaves. The Guardians broadcast a shotgun message claiming that the Starflyer is behind the move to travel to Dyson Alpha. They start working against the project and eventually try to destroy it.

Paula Myo is a Chief Inspector at the Serious Crimes Directorate. She has been hunting Bradley Johansson for one and a half centuries. It is her only unsolved case. She is dispatched to investigate the attack on the spaceship and catches many small fry, but not Bradley Johansson.

This story is reminiscent of The Mote in God's Eye. Curious humans follow an anomaly to discover a very expansionist, aggressive society isolated from the rest of the galaxy, but soon find themselves with a tiger by the tail. Moreover, crewmembers are trapped by the natives. However, this novel builds upon and surpasses the Niven & Pournelle opus in the threat level and strangeness of the aliens. Moreover, it depicts the breakout of the alien Primes into human space.

The story is written in the same multi-threaded format as the Night's Dawn Trilogy. The various characters, and their threads, sometimes are confusing. The story also builds slowly to a climax, although the ending in this volume has all the action that anyone could want. The concluding volume, Judas Unchained, should be out in 2005.

Highly recommended for Hamilton and Niven/Pournelle fans as well as anyone else who enjoys tales of strange and powerful aliens threatening human civilization.

-Arthur W. Jordin

Rating:
Summary: Good beginning--can he keep it up?
Review: Peter F. Hamilton has written his usual lengthy, well-thought-out book of a complex future society which comes into sudden crisis. This is the first book of a two-part series.

In a prologue, Hamilton gives us a great telling of the first Mars landing-which becomes a dream revenge against NASA and its culture. One might think the whole book was written to justify this scene.

But jump ahead a few centuries. Mankind has spread to hundreds of planets, linked by trains which pass through wormholes connecting worlds. With this technology, spaceships are not needed and almost unknown. Prosperity is widespread if not universal, expansion continues at a gradual pace, and the few alien species found so far range from friendly to indifferent.

When two distant stars are discovered to be each surrounded by a sphere, the discovery provokes only mild interest. But when an obscure astronomer learns that the envelopment took place in less than a second, interest turns to alarm, and the first major space expedition in centuries is sent to learn more. But space exploration proves to be a two-way street . . .

Much like the Night's Dawn trilogy, this book has many point-of-view characters, allowing us to follow multiple storylines in this complex book. Hamilton shows his usual talent for getting mankind into a serious fix. Still to be seen is if he can get the species out of it in a convincing manner (something he was not completely successful with in "The Naked God" and "Fallen Dragon.") With artificial intelligence playing a major part in the latter portion of the book, we may be headed for a true deus ex machina solution. And when one of our point of view characters, in search of alien knowledge, picks up a teenage hitchhiker along the way, every literary convention there is tells us that the kid has to play a major part in the outcome . . .

On a negative note: Hamilton, a Brit, should really watch his tendency to have his characters speak British English and exhibit British culture, without any explanation (he did the same thing in Night's Dawn). When an American-born character uses a term like "non-starter" (p. 188) and eats oatcakes (p. 189), it is rather jarring.

A good first part. Let's see where he goes with the second one.

Rating:
Summary: More is more!
Review: Peter F. Hamilton outdoes himself in this giant, sprawling hard-SF thriller. Yes, it has many separate plot-lines, and readers may wonder initially where they all converge. But it is relentlessly compelling, and the world-building here is thoughtful and intelligently conveyed. Unlike some reviewers in this space, I found such attention to detail fascinating---this is how a future human society might actually look and feel.
The action is rendered in great sweeps of imaginative description, but is anchored in the humanity of Hamilton's protagonists. Those of you who require a well-drawn alien nemesis will find it here, in spades. Wormholes, practically-immortal humans, light-year spanning adventures and idiosyncratic characters are all propelled by a civilization-ending threat that is as logical as it is bizarre.
I was also not put off by the fact that the book ends with the promise of resolution in a forthcoming sequel. I'm looking forward to it. It'll give me a chance to re-read Pandora's Star and its sequel in one giant marathon. This is great stuff. Don't be put off by its length or some reviews that complain about it. I wanted more, and it looks like I'm going to get it.

Rating:
Summary: Space Opera at its best
Review: Peter F. Hamilton's new space opera is a treat - a blockbuster-size novel packed full of multiple parallel plot lines and characters, set in a vast Intersolar Commonwealth spanning scores of planets, linked by wormholes, menaced by not only one but two alien intelligences. This stable-appearing society, where humans are immortal thanks to rejuvenation therapy and re-life procedures courtesy of data storage in a vast Senient Intelligence (super-evolved computers), is attacked by the scariest aliens I have met for a while. The singular immotile MorningLightMountain with its billions of motile units (the "Primes")is determined to be the only intelligence in the galaxy. Hamilton describes its alieness brillantly, and I was reminded of the Moties, who were driven (although by other imperatives) to expand and destroy all in their path. However, a deeper threat, which at first seems trivial and a delusion, is that of a second faceless alien intelligence, the Starflyer, which may (or may not) be embedded deep in human society, and possibly a greater menace than the Primes.
Hamilton weaves his characters deftly into a tapestry, some threads at first seemingly irrelevant and only later joining others to form a coherent storyline. At first, I had to jot notes in the back of the book to keep track of the many characters, worlds, associations and political groupings, but by half-way through the book, the direction of the story finally melded into a coherent whole. Perhaps some readers might not have the committment to see through this process of getting to know the many main characters, their settings, and their relevance to the story. But once past this hump, the pace of the book picked up relentlessly to culminate in the Prime alien invasion. The book ends with an almost cliched cliffhanger (literally and metaphorically) - I am sorry that we will have to wait a year for the final half. The first half has set the background for what I hope will be as good a development and conclusion - and not a disappointment as in the final conclusion (almost hasty and abridged in relation to the rest of the carefully developed series)of Night's Dawn Trilogy.
Hamilton - please take your time with the second half Judas Unchained, and give us what you have promised in Pandora's Star.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely disappointing
Review: Reading Pandora's Star was extremely disappointing for me. I very much enjoyed Peter Hamilton's previous works, so was looking forward to another great read. What I found was 758 pages of boredom. The characters were too numerous, shallow, and mostly unengaging. The plot was also severely lacking. Nothing important happens over most of the book. The action is better suited to fill a short story than two entire novels. The rest is filler that is unbelievably tedious to plow through. I was able to get through only half of the book before giving up and speed reading the rest of it.

Rating:
Summary: epic space opera
Review: Rebeccasreads highly recommends PANDORA'S STAR as magnificent, of immense stature. How else can you describe a story of a whole new universe? & the author who has peopled it, & made you believe it exists?

Peter Hamilton's talent is rare on the SF stage. He not only takes you to new worlds, he creates & then explains them so you really understand. His good is not always good, his evil is not always evil although by the time you've finished, you will know the difference.

Outstanding!