User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Better don´t try to find out how to deactivate that space megastructure.
The überbeing Morning Light Mountain and the idea of a collective intelligence hive mind exponentially growing kind of insect like other kind of intelligence than humans thing, that is similar to a virus gone meta, is one of the most fascinating alien intelligence descriptions ever. Ever ever until it comes and exterminates your race. It´s not directly evil, it just hasn´t the intellectual need or interest to grasp that concept, it´s just his mentality logically developed because of an evolutionary arms race that made it necessary and possible to be a genocidal sociopath, what again lets it seem very similar to humans. But it´s not its fault, in contrast to humans.
The Starflyer cult. What might happen if humans get any kind of contact with aliens? Jay, new sects growing like mushrooms, potentially in quantities that endanger the stability of whole colonies or even continents on earth, or why not the whole humankind?
The descriptions of the megastructures built by a (view spoiler)
[ Clarketech using Kardashev scale 2 or 3 civilization (hide spoiler)], the history behind that, and each Morning light mountain sequence are scenes that should be enjoyed like a good wine by sci-fi addict. Others, that aren´t fanatically hooked on the sci-fi genre, should better skim and scan, because they could see them as too wordy, static descriptions without any real action.
In contrast to Hamiltons´ The Night´s Dawn trilogy, which plays in the 27th century and against a science fantasy horror not so always evil forever antagonist, the 24th century set Commonwealth Saga has a more down to galaxy enemy that still has the potential to rule them all. It´s immense how much effort Hamilton puts into his works, how he generates the fractions, settings, loads of characters, and what one can see in the timelines added to his novels is just the tip of the iceberg.
Because he is a planner and plotter, he tends to create a new series over months before he starts writing, enabling him to hold different plotlines with many surprises, cliffhangers, revelations, etc. while never confusing the reader with moments of not knowing what is why where going on thanks to the character is plot, pure show don´t tell, style. This often seen problems in epic fantasy and huge sci-fi series, losing overview, being bored by infodumps, not knowing what the character´s motivations were, and thereby losing interest, are never occurring problems, because his writing is so always compelling. He just imagines all the potential for future realities and shows ideas, action, mentalities, and thereby new use of tropes, I have seen in no other works before.
Great characters en masse and with enough personal space so that they can move, play, and grow, as one is used to from Hamilton´s epic series, are the most important ingredient to make it another astonishing masterpiece of one of the greatest sci-fi authors of all time. With his different works and series, he is covering different time periods of the future, always with an optimistic outlook, creating epic and extremely detailed descriptions of fights, worlds, aliens, future tech, and civilizations, and has a fusion and perfect balance of character and plot driven elements I´ve hardly seen in other authors work.
If you are now into space opera or sci-fi in general, try the very complicated Reynolds and Stephenson, the philosophical Lem, the technothriller Suarez, the lengthy Banks and Brin, The Expanse of course, etc., and generally choose wisely with the help of listopia and dissecting your reading preferences, because there are many subgenres in sci-fi and if you pick the wrong one or don´t skim and scan the passages you personally don´t like so much, you won´t find the usual epiphany and pure reading pleasure the best genre of them all can offer to the reader.
This wise, just joking, advice is added to all reviews of Hamiltons´series.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Hamilton´s future vision is to see the technology and society developing in very detail over long periods of time, making a return to his universe something always stunning and inspiring. It also makes me wonder why he is the only author I know of who did this. One, who is new, lucky you, by the way, ought consider reading it in chronological order, although the series set closest to now, Salvation lost, is still unfinished, so better read before in the following order:
Salvation year 2200
Commonwealth year 2400
The Night´s Dawn trilogy year 2700
The Chronicle of the Fallers year 3400
Void trilogy year 3600
You can of course do as you wish, it´s just how I arrange my rereading to get the most out of it and slowly move further and further away from the boring present.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
Rating: really liked it
We begin at the beginning, because the beginning is awesome and foreshadows the epic quality of
Pandora's Star, as well as the sense of humour, levity, and gravity that Peter F. Hamilton uses to create an incredibly compelling and vast narrative.
Wilson Kime is the pilot of the first manned Mars lander. The mission crew steps onto the surface and raises the United States flag, only to be interrupted by a stranger in a home-made space suit. That suit is attached to a pressure hose providing a breathing supply, and the hose runs through a wormhole back into a college physics lab on Earth. Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaac have just successfully demonstrated their invention of wormhole technology in front of the entire world, making manned spaceflight obsolete in the process.
I did not appreciate the brilliance of this opening at first. Don't get me wrong: I liked
Pandora's Star from the start, but my enjoyment slowly ramped up from, "this is good" to "this is
good" and then it plateaued somewhere around, "OMG, why didn't I know about this book earlier?" But it was slow at the beginning. The cast is almost as large as the book itself, and for the first several chapters (almost a hundred pages in this paperback edition), we do not return to any previously-established character.
In a similarly sprawling, nonchalant fashion, Hamilton introduces a cornucopia of subplots. Many of them seem irrelevant to the main plot at first, and it is easy to wonder what purpose they serve. The murder of Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal was like this for me. Even when one of the main characters, Paula Myo, was assigned to the case, I still didn't think its role in building her characters was sufficient to justify its inclusion. Then Hamilton surprised me by taking the shallow, self-centred, immature Mellanie and turning her into a much more important figure. And suddenly it started making sense.
Hamilton surprised me a lot in
Pandora's Star. This is the first book I have read by him, so I didn't know what to expect. Although the slow pace at the beginning of the book disappointed me at first, the rest of the book more than makes up for it. If you are willing to invest the time required to read it,
Pandora's Star has so much to offer.
For instance, there is the Sentient Intelligence. I have a thing for implacable, neutral, powerful artificial entities. The Eschaton from
Singularity Sky qualifies as one, and I like the SI even more. Artificial intelligence in general intrigues me. More than that, there's just something so
fun in watching an antagonist realize he or she is up against the SI and its sheer
ability. It makes me giggle aloud, to the delight of people around me. During a terrorist attack on the facility where the faster-than-light starship is being built, something starts breaking through the firewalls a terrorist techie has set up around the systems they've hijacked:
"It's going to fall, oh man, half the format codes have been cracked already. No way. I mean no fucking way! Do you know what kind of encryption I used for that thing? Eighty dimensional geometry. Eighty! That should take like a century to break, if you're lucky." He seemed more angry than worried by the event.
Rob was starting to get a real bad feeling about the mission. "So what can crack that kind of encryption?"
The tech became very still. "The SI." His gaze found a ceiling camera that was lined up on his console, and he looked straight into the tiny lens. "Oh shit."
The SI is supposedly neutral in the sense that it is independent of humanity, and human affairs do not concern it, although it likes getting data from us. However, one of the themes of
Pandora's Star is how the unknown causes different groups to work together to explore and push back ignorance for mutual edification and survival. The SI is curious about the mystery of the barriers around the Dyson Pair, and it won't let any terrorists interfere with a starship that might actually go visit the barrier.
Once the
Second Chance arrives at the barrier around Dyson Alpha, the barrier inexplicably deactivates, revealing a thriving civilization in the enclosed solar system. And the Prime civilization, as it calls itself, is even more alien than the SI, the Silfen, the High Angel, or any other species Hamilton has introduced thus far. It's easy to populate your science-fiction universe with vague, humanoid-like aliens. In books, which don't suffer from a make up and digital effects budget, one can even describe improbable and nonhumanoid forms. It takes real skill, however, to portray truly alien thought processes. Hamilton succeeds when he describes the development of MorningLightMountain, an entity that eventually becomes the entire Prime civilization.
As an antagonist, MorningLightMountain is scary. It is essentially a meme. Prime society consists of intelligent/sentient but immobile entities known as immotiles. They are tended by motile units under their control in a sort of queen/drone fashion. The immotiles expand in networks of discrete immotile units, and the overall immotile personality is a kind of collective mind formed from the memories and senses of its member immotiles. MorningLightMountain is the Napoleon of its kind, swiftly gaining swaths of territory on the Prime homeworld. When the Primes develop space travel and colonize the nearby Dyson Beta system, they discover that the time lag in communications means the immotile copies of themselves sent to Beta have diverged. They are now
alienPrimes! This gives us our first glimpse into the true depth of the Prime revulsion for the Other, and indeed, MorningLightMountain's xenophobia for
anything other than itself.
Then a quantum barrier goes up around Dyson Alpha, and MorningLightMountain and the Primes are cut off from the universe for a millennium. When the barrier drops and MorningLightMountain observes the
Second Chance's wormhole-powered hyperdrive, it starts thinking about faster-than-light travel, learns about the Commonwealth, and begins plotting its expansion into the rest of the galaxy. It's taking over, and it's killing everything that isn't it.
Yeah, humanity is in trouble. And it's not the most morally ambiguous of villains, but it is scary. Besides, Hamilton throws plenty of ambiguity—moral and otherwise—into his human characters. Those terrorists I mentioned earlier are the Guardians of Selfhood. Their leader, Bradley Jonasson, believes an alien called the Starflyer is manipulating humanity towards a malign end. At first, Hamilton portrays Jonasson as delusional and the Guardians as straight-up crackpot terrorists. As the story progresses, however, more and more rational characters begin believing the Starflyer might be real. Finally, we the readers have to accept the possibility that the Starflyer might be real. Suddenly the conspiracy theory is reified, and Hamilton has pulled off a very careful plot twist. Bravo!
But that's a result of great characterization in general. Consider Ozzie, the counterpart to Nigel Sheldon. He's a loner, a rich recluse with a personal wormhole, and that gives him considerable power. So Hamilton strands him in the wilderness with a backwater kid and no electronics on a quest for more information about the Dyson barrier. It's a great way to build the mythology of the character but limit his ability to just zap his way out of any situation. Hamilton balances the abilities of his futuristic society with real peril. When the Primes invade Commonwealth space, we get treated to an epic battle in which Nigel Sheldon, with the help of the SI, uses wormholes to collapse MorningLightMountain's wormholes. But even with the invasion curtailed, the Commonwealth loses several planets to MorningLightMountain's motile forces, suffering a terrible setback with no real way to defend itself against future attacks.
All of the main characters are involved in some way in the invasion drama, but the one that surprised me the most is Mellanie. I discounted her as a minor supporting character, one whose antagonism toward Paula Myo was supposed to make us dislike her. Yet Hamilton turned her into an ambiguous protagonist who, while opportunistic, his also intelligent, compassionate, and cool in a crisis. Thanks to a deal she struck with the SI to further her career as a journalist, she is the only one on Elan with access to the cybersphere after the Prime attack. So she coordinates an evacuation of the remote Randtown, putting herself in danger multiple times to ensure everyone escapes alive. Hamilton then impresses me with his deft characterization by dropping gentle reminders that Mellanie has not suddenly become an altruist. She's still seeking an angle, still wondering how she can leverage her newfound abilities for her own advancement. She's complex, and I like that.
In addition to the SI and wormhole travel, there is an awfully long laundry list of technology that Hamilton shows off in his future society. For the most part, he does a good job addressing the moral implications such technology has. Unlike some science-fiction novels that progress from a single technology, like the ability to download into a new body after death, Hamilton doesn't quite focus on any one technology and its implications. In that sense, it is a little too broad to go into a lot of depth. Also, there is not a lot of exposition to be had in
Pandora's Star; it took me a while to figure out what exactly the Sentient Intelligence or the High Angel were. However, Hamilton's broad strokes have the advantage of presenting an entire society with multiple technological innovations, and their resulting social ramifications, rather than extrapolation from a single technology.
Citizens of the Commonwealth can rejuvenate when they grow old, essentially making them immortal. This has interesting implications for family and relationships: marriage is a much less permanent; first-lifers are considered less emotionally mature in comparison to people who have lived for a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years. Living three lifetimes can build up a lot of memories of course, so memory manipulation and storage is big in
Pandora's Star. None of the questions this technology raises are unique to this book; rather, they are standard SF fare: is the clone with an upload of your memories a continuation of you, or is it just a copy? How does being able to edit out the fact that you murdered someone affect your culpability? And so on. Hamilton is not breaking any new ground, but he does manage to integrate these ideas into an interesting, dynamic society. To that he adds a story with an exciting conflict, a challenging enemy, and great interstellar politics.
Basically,
Pandora's Star is space opera on crack. Like Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge, Peter F. Hamilton can come up with cool ideas
and spin a good tale. Hence, even though this book weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages, that's 1,000 pages of quality storytelling. And yeah, there are wormholes and weird alien creatures and people getting killed and re-lifed. But science fiction is just a setting, and
Pandora's Star is really about murder, revenge, and jealousy; it's about our relentless drive to explore versus the dangers of the unknown; and it's an epic tale of humanity's survival as we are threatened from an external force and our own internal ideological struggles. It's simply grand, and it's really good.
Rating: really liked it
I have very mixed feelings about this book, and of the experience of having read it. As a result, I'm not sure I can say that I truly 'enjoyed' it; it's well-crafted, overall, but at the same time not without its frustrations.
First, the good stuff: there's a hugely epic plot here, ultimately concerned with ensuring the continued survival of the human race; bold, three-dimensional characters who are intriguing, and draw you into their story; plot twists that you truly never see coming, and which are revealed with a subtle mastery that forces you to rethink everything you've read up until that point;and a fascinating, amazingly-thought out world that all of this is set in.
On the other hand, however, the book has its problems, chief of which is its length and pacing. This is a book that is almost one thousand pages long, which by itself I don't have a problem with. Some of my favourite novels and novel series feature lengths like that. While the length isn't a problem, the way the plot develops within that length was a problem for me - I remember at one point thinking to myself "oh, the action is starting to pick up and the plot's finally moving forward", and then looking at the page number and seeing something in the three hundreds. Then, after another four hundred pages of exciting outer space action, things slow down again for another couple of hundred pages, once again getting exciting for the last hundred pages before finally ending on a cliffhanger. Add to this chapters that were routinely over fifty pages long, and which didn't seem to have any strong internal structure to them, and you're left with a book that I strongly considered giving up on several times during the process of reading it. And yet, at the end, I was left with a strong desire to check out the sequel, which is another thousand page book and will no doubt have many of the same issues.
Rating: really liked it
From the other ratings, there are lots of people who like this a lot, so it may be unfair to review this book in comparison with the best "hard science fiction." Thus, this is a warning for the other people who don't know what "space opera" is and are looking for the next Asimov or OS Card. He's not here.
Space opera. According to Wikipedia, "New space opera proponents claim that the genre centers on character development, fine writing, high literary standards, verisimilitude, and a moral exploration of contemporary social issues."
That all sounds great but Pandora's Star is a drawn-out affair with tons of useless details, many intertwining sub-plots, and many less-than-engaging characters. The main problem is the feeling of being in a mediocre TV series that "jumps the shark" in the first episode. The story is dragged out unnecessarily with plot devices that come off as cheap tricks or cliches (unexplained mystery cliffhanger, detectives staking out arms dealers, etc.). For a book about faster than light space travel, things move very ponderously.
Rating: really liked it
Some time in the not far future humanity suddenly decided it is more fun to go to Mars than have endless wars in the Middle East (hard to believe this sudden break of a common sense, is not it?) In any way NASA got enough funding to organize a flight to the Red Planet. After a long flight with a trained crew everything was ready for landing with all the appropriate fanfares and direct video translation to Earth. The moment US flag was about to be proudly planted in Martian soil something very comical happened. Two students working in a garage discovered how to create a wormhole and stepped from sunny California right into the middle of the landing crew asking the flag-bearer, "Dude, do you need help with it?"
Needless to say the timing of the revelation of their discovery was so perfect it instantly killed the spaceflight and NASA itself.
Fast forward several hundred years. Using the wormhole technology humans colonized countless planets with majority of them still accepting a central authority - this collection became known as Commonwealth. Somewhere on the edge of Commonwealth a second-rated astronomer made an astounding discovery: a double star vanished.
It did not go supernova, this did not appear to be a natural phenomena, so artificial nature was strongly suspected. Also the level of technology to do something like this was not anywhere in the foreseeable future of humanity. The next and more alarming question was,
what was the civilization capable of creating such technology afraid of? Of cause the humans decided to investigate if only to prepare for this super-threat. Giving a very mild spoiler I can tell they discovered sentient race whose motto was "Nuke first, ask questions later and let God sort them out". Hard times for our side, lots of battles on different scales, and other grim events followed.
At this I just barely scratched the surface of what was going on in the book. I will just mention that it also has galactic-level conspiracy theories, (again) galactic-level politics, some murders that did not make any sense, soul-searching, interesting characters, mysterious happenings, lots of alien worlds, terrorism, smuggling, crazy cults - in short everything and a kitchen sink.
I can never stop being impressed by Peter F. Hamilton's imagination. The guy can effortlessly describe dozens of different planets with their landscape, geology, and climate making it easy to imagine being there.
Some of the POVs and plot lines connected to them are very interesting and always leave you wanted to know more about the development. I already mentioned some interesting characters.
On the negative side I had the impression that Hamilton likes to show off his great imagination. Some of the descriptions were way too long. Sadly I failed to get excited about some of POVs and their subplots. For example I could not care less about Jastine until almost the last page and it took a lot of time for Ozzie to become interesting. If some kind soul (I mean - editor) cuts off these unexciting parts - reducing the length of the book by half - I would rate the remaining part with 6 stars, no questions asked.
As it is now my rating is only 4 stars. I will read the next book soon, but I need to take a little break before reading another 900 page mammoth.
Rating: really liked it
6.0 stars. This one may make it onto my list of "All Time Favorites" but I am going to wait until I finish Judas Unchained as the two books should really be treated as one VERY LONG novel. This was an amazing read filled with mind blowing ideas and superb (and I really mean superb) world-building. Do not let the length of the book keep you from giving it a try. It is incredibly well-written throughout and I think the length is warranted given how much is going on. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!
Rating: really liked it
What a mediocre attempt. I somehow managed to slog through all 989 pages of this, and it never completely lost its narrative thread, in spite of an astonishing redundancy in unnecessary description. It is also significantly hampered by a lack of imagination; my suspension of disbelief cannot withstand the idea of the year 2380 basically looking *just like* the year 2010, only with extra planets, and a small handful of cool new tech. By the end of this tome, Hamilton has *almost* managed to put together enough plot elements to sucker you into picking up the equally-hefty second volume. Except I can already tell it's not worth it. So what if the alien Starflyer really exists. I have better things to do than wade through 300 more pages of irrelevant description that does nothing to move the plot forward, does nothing to shape or contextualize any characters, and does nothing to enhance the reader's experience.
It has moments of clarity, and moments of being a good story, but not enough to justify the page count.
Rating: really liked it
3.5 *
In a lot of ways, this ambitious novel, like all of the Peter F. Hamilton novels I can think of, should be put on a higher rung than all the other SF out there. Why? Because it's LONG.
Throw in an enormous cast of characters who won't die because they can be uploaded and put back in new bodies, complete with full rejuvenation treatments that sometimes go wrong, space travel, wormhole technologies, and a huge Commonwealth of systems fully colonized.
Add characters of all stripes: from reporters to police to politicians to terrorists to technologists, throw them into a slowly boiling cauldron of scientific intrigue with a few Dyson spheres locking away an alien species, leave even more to deal with the political consequences back home. You know, like the detail that someone who could lock away an alien species is already super powerful, or the question as to why the species was locked away, to begin with. Good stuff all around.
So why do I have a bit of an issue with this?
Well, for the same reason I think it should be put on a higher rung than most SF. It's super ambitious, leading in and through whole lives as if we were reading a classic novel on the level of Les Miserables, giving us a very clear picture of the future worlds that are very much like our own except for a few heaping handfuls of world-changing techs. We have social commentary that would be welcome in any shorter soft-SF, mysteries that would be fine in any techno-thriller, big scoops for the expose crowd, and decades of spy intrigue. WITH the big alien threat. Any piece of this would be great, or even two. Or even three.
I need to face it. I find some parts slightly boring and others fantastic. I find myself dreading another novel-long subject I'd rather skip in favor of the other stories I love more. This is sometimes a problem with super-long novels. My attention wants to wander if it's not super fantastic. And then I keep wondering if this might have been better served with a HUGE edit. Or cut them up into a lot of side novels.
My appetite had been whetted with the big story. I just wanted to stick with the big story. And yet, most of the threads DID tie back in, eventually. It just took a novel's length of time for each to get there.
I AM very impressed with the whole book, and even more so that Hamilton keeps pulling off these HUGE works, but I'm worried that I'm bouncing off of them.
Even so, I've made a commitment to continue with Judas Unchained and I've been accepted for a Netgalley ARC for Salvation, so maybe I'll just grit my teeth and enjoy what I do enjoy in them. There's plenty to point at. :)
Rating: really liked it
This is up there with the best of the best for sci-fi space opera extravaganzas. It’s got world-building par excellance, brilliant projections of technology, and a great cast of characters. Set in 2380, Hamilton poses for us a Commonwealth of hundreds of planets colonized by different styles of humanity, made possible by wormhole technology. Immortalizing rejuvenation, artificial intelligence, and computer storage of human memories are standard fare woven into the saga in fresh ways. The few aliens encountered so far appear benign but mystifying. For example, the Silfen are friendly but boring to most humans in their simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle and hippie-like mystical outlook. But suddenly a dorky astronomer’s discovery of the disappearance of two stars 100 light years away raises the spectre of incredibly advanced aliens in the galaxy who can put up a spherical barrier around a whole solar system. Does the event imply a civilization wanting to protect itself from other dangerous aliens, or does it instead reflect a fencing in of a dangerous species by a more powerful but beneficient alien race?
Hamilton orchestrates an array of stories that evolve in parallel before eventually linking up with each other. That takes some patience, and trust, from the reader. Fortunately, there are four colorful characters to bring life to the advancing threads of the epic. Nigel Sheldon, inventor of the wormhole, gets tapped to adapt the technology to propel an interstellar ship, using clues from a starship left behind with a space station by an elusive alien race, the Starflyers, apparently motivated to help and study other species. Wilson Kime, an early astronaut on his fourth rejuvenation, is engaged to manage the massive development project and captain the expedition to the cloaked star systems. Ozzie Isaac, the super-wealthy, pragmatic partner for Nigel’s science, makes a personal quest to draw out the Silfen on anything useful they may know about the star-cloaking event and ends up on an epic journey on foot with a boy that mysteriously takes him to unknown worlds and survival challenge without the benefit of technology. Finally, we have the brilliant Commonwealth crime fighter Paula Myo, who for over a century has been obsessively pursuing the leader of a seeming cult dedicated to countering the evil and hidden designs of the Starflyer species. Her investigations of their terrorist activities eventually aligns with the narratives of the other characters when the group, the Guardians of Selfhood, make a well-orchestrated assault on the nearly complete starship and base.
The expedition gets underway and some exiting discoveries are made about the alien threat to humans and other sentients of the galaxy, as masterfully revealed in the thrilling orchestrations of the diverse plot elements. Hamilton deserves kudos for a side story from the mind a really alien alien, MorningLightMountain, and its successful directing of evolution of its sessile, hive-mind species with dumb motile elements into a one super organism. The author terrified me with the fate of captured humans from the expedition and the amplification of the alien’s powers with the technology secrets it extracts. The idea that humans and all other species are a threat and must be eliminated fulfills well the paranoia that lurks at the back of our minds when we try to imagine the wonders of learning we are not alone in the universe.
This book was fabulous entertainment for me, reviving the same pleasures that led me to hard science fiction in my youth and satisfied in recent years by the likes of Alastair Reynolds, Iaian Banks, and Vernor Vinge. Before you consider taking on this epic, you should be aware that is not the beginning of a series of relatively independent stories but rather a 2,000 page plus novel that is split into two. I am not sure when I will pursue the second half sitting heavy on my shelf, Judas Unchained. That is because I got the gist of its events from a recent sequel set several hundred years later, A Night Without Stars, which I found to provide a wonderful and thrilling closure. Sincere thanks to Apatt for recommending this book. Very different from other works of this author I read awhile back, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy and The Nano Flower.
Rating: really liked it
3.5 stars, rounding up
Quick pros: complex story, huge cast of characters, and it was cool to see how people crossed paths. I love that it's very, very hard SF. With huge stakes!
It's easier to spew about the cons than pros with this one, honestly. I just really enjoyed the story and the worldbuilding and really need to know how it ends!
Quick cons: Um. The sexism. Yeah. Paula is the only main female character who doesn't get a sex kitten moment. Probably because she's written as a man. And just - wow - Hamilton's portrayal of women constantly using sex to manipulate men was gross. And if they're not having sex and in a position of power, they're a "ballcrusher". I don't want to dig into this further... there's a lot. (Good god, harems?!)
The only other con is the sheer length. Hamilton describes a lot of stuff - planetary geography, city layouts, every single thinv a character does, etc. - in excruciating detail when it's really not necessary. I like more balance between description and actually moving the story along at less than a ponderous pace.
I want to finish the story, so I'll be checking out Judas Unchained soon. Hopefully Hamilton ditches the harems and sex nymphets and angry men calling their wives whores. I can take the verbosity... but the perpetuated sexist slant? Not so much.
Rating: really liked it
90% of Pandora's Star irked the crap out of me. First, it just goes on and on and on. It's seems like a bunch of stories pieced together with no real connection. Many of the storylines never even go anywhere. Hamilton does a phenomenal job of over-describing everything. It gets mind-numbing.
Second, the sexism really annoyed the heck out of me. I'm not usually one to scream "sexism", but Hamilton can't resist talking about any female character's looks and about how some male character would like to have sex with her. It seems that EVERY woman in the Commonwealth is beautiful, especially if she's recently undergone rejuvenation at 280 and looks 18 with hormones to match. Honestly, if every woman is beautiful and sexy, would anyone even notice? Wouldn't beautiful and sexy be just plain and ordinary? I notice that Hamilton never describes the men, unless it's through the eyes of one of the horny women.
Third, the Commonwealth is way too much like 21st Century America. You'd think that human culture would be as different 300 years from now as today is from 300 years ago. As far as I can tell, everybody pretty much acts, talks, dresses and lives the same way we do now except they have wormholes to take them to other planets.
The last thing that really got me was the narration. John Lee is a very popular narrator, but he is as boring as anyone I've heard. He's just terrible at accents and he makes all the women sound like drag queens, except Paula Myo. Paula sounds like a man. The book skips back and forth between many storylines, but Lee never pauses in his narration so you know that you're on a different plot. In books, you at least get a page break.
The book did pick up quite a lot at the end. However, it ended in mid-stream with all the plots. I ended up downloading the sequel,
Judas Unchained to my Nook. It seems like it will be much better in text.
Rating: really liked it
Science-fiction's answer to
The Malazan Book of the Fallen? It does come quite close in many ways.
To begin with a complaint, I am somewhat astounded by the effort-to-gain ratio expected from the reader here. It is apparently impossible to tie up a single plot thread in this book despite its modest length of 1144 pages. It reads like the first half of a book that Hamilton was simply not allowed to publish as one single 2500-page volume. Everything that happens could easily be squeezed into half the length, and it almost appears as if there was no editing done prior to publication.
That being said, I fear that cutting the book's length would have cut some of its strengths rather than the absurd weaknesses (an example of the latter being the author's insistence on displaying the sexual maturity of a 14-year old boy). But those strengths are generally the same as those of fantasy writers in the vein of Steven Erikson. Diverse cast of characters and setting, long-form descriptions, exciting locations and fascinating new theoretical concepts.
Hamilton's worldbuilding is impressive. The various worlds of the galaxy are vividly and skilfully described, so is human society at large. The feudalesque politicking is evocative of hallmark works such as
Dune, and the overall anarcho-capitalist, semi-dystopian socioeconomic system often feels similar to the great works of cyberpunk on a galactic scale.
Characters range from cardboard cutouts to annoying brats to deep and three-dimensional figures. And although the last category is in the minority, they are worth suffering through the others for. The iconic criminal investigator Paula Myo is one; the disgruntled old Socialist warrior Adam Elvin is another. Hell, even the book's mandatory back-from-retirement spaceship captain and enigmatic Messianic cult leader are quite enjoyable figures.
Overall,
Pandora's Star reads like an unpolished gem. A collection of intriguing ideas sorely needing more work in order to be truly great. But as it stands, it's admittedly not bad.
Rating: really liked it
Superb, Awesome! The first-half of The Commonwealth Saga is 988 pages. The second half "Judas Unchained" is 1,236 pages and completes the "2,200 page single book". Don't be scared off! This is an incredible value!This is Very Good, hard sci-fi, many many characters, so it takes a while to get into the book. When I started the first book, I felt there were far too many, too wordy descriptions of the local scene. Creative often, but perhaps the whole saga could lose 100 pages.
The evolution of the aggressive alien species is truly Brilliant.
See rest of review in Judas Unchained.
Rating: really liked it
It’s been a while since I’ve read Sci fi this good. I’ve probably been making poor reading choices in this genre for a bit. But finally, I’ve hit pay dirt with an author who has hit the sweet spot with great concepts, epic landscape/world building, excellent plot,
AND , very importantly, excellent
CHARACTERISATION. The story is set some 300 years in the future where wormhole technology has allowed humanity to spread out to begin colonising other star systems.
This was a big book and a lot denser than I expected as well. At 200 pages in there were still new characters being rolled out. So we have a large cast with no central or main character. Yet very few if any felt “disposable.” The stories range from detective mystery, to alien conspiracies, and throw in a love story that spans the stars. Puts a different spin on “star crossed lovers.” All the arcs work together and interweave to form an epic tapestry of human exploration and endeavour. So after feeling a little daunted in the beginning at the epic scale of the world and cast, the book just kept getting better and better, even as the story got bigger and bigger.
What I really appreciate about this book, is how Hamilton introduces you to the technology and the wider Universe. He basically just throws you in with the nitty gritty of the character he’s developing at the time and just lets you have it.
For Example let’s spend a day riding shotgun with Intersolar police officer, Paula Myo. Fantastic. What are we doing today Paula? Today Paula has a lead on a case she’s been trying to crack for a long time. How long? About 140 years. WHAT! But you don’t look a day over 30. How’s this possible? Rejuve...duh. Apparently, in the future, we have developed stem cell technology to the point that we can pay to have a “rejuvenation,” a process that reverses the aging process at a cellular level. The process can be repeated as often as you can pay for making one virtually immortal. Of course, if you just want a bit of cosmetic surgery to get rid of some body fat, erase a few wrinkles, or get a totally new face and body shape there’s “reprofiling.” So, Paula, what happens if someone just shoots you dead, huh. Huh? Then there’s “relife.” Apparently we can have a memory chip that stores all our, well, memories, which can be extracted and placed into a new clone body. What if someone shoots you in the head?– AH HA. No problem, just revert to a backup held “off site,” and pay for some counselling to deal with any resulting existential hang-ups.
Ok Paula so where’s this lead taking us? Oh, that would be on a planet some light years away. Isn’t that going to take a while to get to from here? About 40 minutes by car if the traffic isn’t too bad. WHAT!? We are going from Paris to another planet by car? Actually, we aren’t in Paris anymore. That tunnel we went through is actually a wormhole, one of many that connect all the human worlds into a single Commonwealth network making all the star systems virtual neighbours. Hang on, let me connect to my ebutler to let head office know we’re here. You mean head office back through the worm hole? Welcome to the Unisphere rookie. And what’s an ebutler? Is that some sort of smartphone? What size screen does it have? Actually I have inserts in my eyes that projects the screen/image directly onto my retinas. But...but...where’s the cpu kept? WHAT?! You mean those tattoos on the side of your head aren’t a fashion accessory? They’re actually an advanced circuit board wet wired directly into your brain and nervous system? I guess you won’t be too impressed with my new Iphone 5 then.
And pretty much for most the book WHAT?! And WOW! are pretty much how a lot of my experience can be characterised as I read this book. Even towards the end there were characters and events and discoveries that surprised me. Unpacking this Universe with its concepts and technology was really fun. We get themes of human exploration, artificial intelligence, immortality, alien conspiracy and more. And the action was fantastic, whether it be the lone assassin whacking his target and erasing his memory chip, to small scale terrorist/patriot military action taking down installations, to epic full on space battles with combat drones packing EMPs to planet slagging Leviathans unleashing nuclear hell on entire worlds.
Fantastic - 5 stars. Can’t wait to read the next book in the series (warning, this isn’t a stand alone story).
Rating: really liked it
5 Super big stars
A new favorite read of mine. This massive tome has everything that a sci-fi lover would ever want...
Review to come
What a total waste...I never came back and wrote a review for this book which is now among my very favorite novels. This is probably the longest novel that I have ever read, but I never felt it. Hamilton creates a massive cast, places them in an epic adventure, and has it cover vast distances of space. This is truly space opera at its finest.
I wish that I had taken the time to write a real review on this book as it deserves massive praise. I can only say that this is one of my favorite science fiction novels of all time. Fans of the genre should not miss out on this epic ride. It is not a hard science novel and really would appeal to a vast crowd. There is a great mystery and adventure in this space opera.....
A MUST READ!!!
