Customer Reviews

Pandora's Star (Commonwealth Saga)

5 star:		(90)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(29)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

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.

Let me start off by saying I enjoyed this book a lot. I have only two quibbles, but they prevent me from giving it 5 stars. Quibbles first.

The narrative style gets in the way of both the story and the characters. Except in a few places, the action is told almost entirely via narration; we don't discover the characters, we are told about them. As a result only a few characters stand out. The narrator's filter occludes the rest. SImilarly, the action and the character's interactions are described by the narrator, rather than playing out by themselves. I know that some like this style, but I don't.

My other quibble is that the books stops halfway through the story, at a cliff-hanger. This is mitigated by it being an actual CLIFF-hanger, but I'm not fond of this wait-til-next-episode stuff. Next episode is March 2005, BTW.

Now, having griped, I must admit I enjoyed this book immensely. The rich portrayals of the 25th Century society, politics and economics all ring true. The implications of indefinite life, told in passing, are interesting, especially as they add to a body of other current work (e.g. MacLeod, Morgan). The natural refusal of all concerned to believe in (or adequately prepare for) the several dooms that are approaching, and the coming end of their Golden Age, are completely human and completely tragic. In many ways its an allegory for our own times.

If Amazon had a listing for the next book, I'd have ordered it already.

Peter F. Hamilton has written a great story with Pandora's Star.

I don't want to argue a case for people to like this book, some

will love it while others won't. We all enjoy different types

of stories and authors - so let me give my opinion to those who

are contemplating reading this book.

READ IT & ENJOY! I was very happy to see another 'BIG' book

from Hamilton. I am also a fan of short story collections, but

sometimes it's nice to be engulfed by a deep story which can be

enjoyed over many weeks or months of reading : )

Parts of the book I enjoyed much:

Scenes where the characters are being chased or trying to

elude others (Hamilton wrote these parts well - I couldn't put

the book down!)

Detailed enviroments of 'other' worlds - At one point Hamilton

places some characters into freezing climates with limited

means to warm themselves, I could feel the cold!

The great dilemma when humans find an alien race trapped

inside a barrier! We wonder why they are trapped there,

Who constructed this barrier to keep them there & more

importantly why !?

Mankind must travel farther than ever from earth to study this

barrier and the aliens trapped inside it, all the while being

warned by a group of humans who claim to know that these aliens

WANT US TO COME AND RELEASE THEM and in doing so will spell

disaster for humanity!

Of course there is so much more to this book, some of the

concepts such as 're-life' (once you die, the ability to

have your body cloned and regenerated at a much quicker rate

with most of your past memories intact) make this book so

interesting *

I enjoyed the characters very much, especially the way they

interacted with others, thought out and interesting.

I give this book 5 stars because it does what I think a good

book should do --- tells a great story! ---

For those who enjoy BIG STORIES, DETAILED WORLDS, MYSTERIES,

HUMANITY at it's BEST & WORST and SCIENCE FICTION !

______ give this book a read _______ : )

Ok, first of all, its not a space opera. Very little of it actually happens anywhere in space.

Second, the book should come with a very clear indication on the cover : this is the first book in the series, DO NOT start unless you are content with not getting ANY sort of conclusion to the story at the end of the first book.

It really only started getting interesting in the second half, and then abruptly cut off.

Some of the characters in the story ring very hollow too, and at points the environmental descriptions get to be really tedious and irrelevant.

Being a huge fan of the 'Night's Dawn' trilogy, I was naturally very happy to get my hands on this book. If you liked 'Night's Dawn', there's a chance you will find something to your liking in here - but don't expect anything approaching the quality of 'The Neutronium Alchemist'.

In this series (completed by 'Judas Unchained' next year), Hamilton seems to set out to do something similar to what he did in 'Night's Dawn': present a riveting, complex world and then take a sledgehammer to it. The universe in 'Pandora's Star' sure is awfully detailed, and parts of it (such as the trains that travel between worlds) are surely fascinating.

However, the world just doesn't click as neatly as 'Night's Dawn', and I was left with the feeling that, as detailed as this novel was, I just didn't buy into it. There's a LOT of pages in this book used to describe the world, but instead of being mesmerising, they tend to be very frustrating as the author takes the reader by the hand to guide him through yet another human colony vaguely based on Western places, such as Venice or California.

I think this is one of these books that would have benefited from having less, not more. Some parts were very carefully crafted and interesting, while other sub-plots were frustrating for being so boring and leading nowhere. In some cases (the fanfic-level chapter on the court case of a rich businessman, to quote one) was so poorly written and so unappealing that they almost convinced me to put down the book and pick up something else.

Because of the number of secondary characters in the novel, some characters become such clichés that they`re actually painful to read. Mark, the "everyday normal guy" witnessing the events of the novel in the midst of his very boring life, made me groan every time his name showed up. Mellanie, the nubian naive girl who gets mistreated by the rich man she loves blindly, was also very painful to read so stereotypical she was. It's a pity, because they ultimately bury great characters such as Nigel Sheldon or Ozzie, that show a bit more fleshing out. Oh, and to show you how poorly fleshed-out these secondary characters turned out to be, I was unable to find one woman in the novel that was not somehow beautiful and closer to a man's fantasy than an actual believeable woman.

Still; throughout all these gripes is an interesting bit of space opera waiting to unfold. The beauty of 'Night's Dawn' was to see a fully realized world fall to pieces under a new threat. 'Judas Unchained' promises to do exactly that to the world of 'Pandora's Star'. This promise has kept me going through this very long novel: that all I read so far was preparation for Peter Hamilton taking an awesome sledgehammer to his carefully constructed world. That is not to say I harbor fantasies of revenge upon this long novel, but rather that this long preparation might be worth it once Hamilton turns things upside down.

If the followup is up to par with Hamilton's previous works, then this novel might be worth slowly wading through. Here's hoping that it will be: because Pandora's Star in itself is ambitious, but so flawed that it failed to fire up my imagination and really engage me.

Somewhere within the 1,000 pages of this book is a very good 600 page book struggling to emerge.

In Hamilton's desire to craft a comprehensive future world he launches into sub-plots, characters and details that fail to serve his story line. The result is a story that plods along relieved by only moments at a quicker pace.

When the pace picks up Pandora's Star is difficult to put down. Alas, these moments are far too few leaving one looking for the end of chapters in the hope that the next chapter will bring more energy.

Halfway through Pandora's Star I became aware that this was only the first half of the story. Only after reading some 2,000 pages of Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained is this saga brought to a close. Given the slog to get through Pandora's Star, Judas Unchained may have to await my being stranded on a desert island.

Pandora's Star (2004) 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

I have read a lot of these big SF multi volume epics. Kim Stanley Robinson is good, Vernor Vinge is great, Neal Stephenson is undoubtedly brilliant, and I read Alistair Reynolds or Kevin Anderson when there's nothing new by the other luminaries.
But then Peter F Hamilton puts out a new novel and everything else is put into perspective. (Although Misspent Youth left me a bit cold, but I forgive him now that Pandora's Star is here.)
Other reviewers have compared his work to Arthur C Clarke or Asimov, but in reality there is no comparison. Respect to the old guard, but Hamilton writes way better than either of them. I cut my teeth on those guys, so I don't say that lightly.
So, Pandora's Star, what can I say? I started it yesterday and I am on pae 271 right now, but I am so excited that I had to put up a review already (even though it means taking a few minutes out from reading).
Hamilton's writing is perfect. He has an uncanny, almost supernatural, grasp of the form, and his agile plotting, the nuances, the characterisation are all flawless. I love this guy. The science is hard, the bad guys are wickedly complex and the heroes are all too human. The way it unfolds is utterly fascinating.
Pandora's Star is a detective story, and as such is unputdownable. Rolled in to boot are the epic quest and a breathtaking vision of society three hundred years hence. Like the Night's Dawn books, Pandora's Star makes me wish I lived in Hamilton's imagination.
The Hard SF Opera has become a kind of cliche - the same ideas roll around from one author to the next, recombined in new and different ways. Some authors are happy with this, but there only are a couple who, in my opinion, consistently create masterpieces in the genre. Greg Egan is one. And Peter F Hamilton is the other.

I gave up after 650 pages... his tendency is to obsessively detail every planet's geology, culture, development, and history only to have it have no actual relevance to the plot, while leaving most of the humans without discernable motivations beyond the broadly comic and obvious.

Entire swaths of this "epic" could be cut without impacting the core story. And yes, I skipped to the end only to discover no good resolutions... only buy this if you're prepared to endure 3000 eventual pages of this largely unedited meandering.

I'm not afraid of space opera: I love Iain M Banks' Culture books, Alastiar Reynolds' series, and others back to Larry Niven. But those authors provide detail to propel the story, to add relevance and texture. Hamilton is not in this league.

First off, since this book along with Judas Unchained are basically one story split in half, I can't review these two separately.

The basic premise is promising. Human's have discovered a mysterious barrier surrounding two stars. And the opening of this story is good. But it is downhill from there, with the exception of a few scattered gems. But by the end of the story, I was skimming because not only is Hamilton far too verbose, the rest of the story just wasn't so interesting. While trying to not ruin the story, the end resolution is allowed by some surprise invention that really came from nowhere, and is delayed by a ethical controversy that Hamilton never really convinced me was prudent or importan (and in fact, I disagree with his conclusion).

In summary, I was incredibly disappointed with the ending, and the meandering it took to get there. But there were some very creative and storytelling gems along the way.