Pandora's Star (Commonwealth Saga) by Peter F Hamilton and John Lee

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Pandora's Star (Commonwealth Saga)
Available from Amazon
Price: $34.99
Updated on 12-28-2008.

Features

Audio CD

Publisher: Tantor Media; MP3 Una edition (November 1, 2008)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1400157641

ISBN-13: 978-1400157648

Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches

Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces ()

From Publishers Weekly
Hamilton's exhilarating new opus proves that "intelligent space opera" isn't an oxymoron. By the 24th century, the vast human Commonwealth has spread from Earth via artificial wormholes. Various benign or seemingly indifferent alien races have been encountered during exploration of new planets, but an astronomer sparks curiosity by announcing that a pair of stars is enclosed by a mysterious energy barrier. Unfortunately, a space expedition discovers that the shield was created to imprison an insatiably greedy mass mind that sees any other race as a mortal threat. When the barrier somehow is lowered, the alien immediately attacks the largely unprepared Commonwealth, while humans begin wondering if yet another inhuman power has manipulated events that unleashed this threat. The author deftly juggles many characters in multiple plot lines, sometimes slowing down the action briefly, at other times racing forward. Revelations late in the book will have readers scurrying back to earlier pages to reinterpret what they initially thought. Not many SF writers are capable of tackling such a big project so confidently. In this respect, Hamilton (Fallen Dragon) resembles a less cheery but very tech-savvy—and extremely paranoid—Charles Dickens. Given the abrupt cliffhanger of an ending, some may prefer to save this massive installment until the story's conclusion, Judas Unleashed, appears next year. Anyone who begins this one, however, probably won't be able to put it down.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
Hamilton creates a dense, thoroughly defined twenty-fourth-century world, in which humanity has colonized the stars, thanks to the discovery of wormhole travel, and established a successful commonwealth. The species has even encountered aliens and space-faring artifacts. One remaining mystery is the barrier around stars known as the Dyson Pair. Human curiosity still being what it is, a spaceship capable of faster-than-light travel (thanks to those wormholes again) goes to investigate. When what's behind the barrier is discovered, the thrill-ride really starts. Aliens formerly trapped inside it, fighting over limited resources, are freed to invade human space. Unfortunately, that is more or less where this book leaves us, but a sequel is in the works. Hamilton's attention to character development makes the slow buildup to a dizzyingly destructive denouement rewarding, and all the little subplots and threads one hopes will be tied back to the main thread keep it complex and engaging. Hamilton is never simple, and even his aliens are well written, complex creations with their own motivations. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Pandora's Star (Hardcover) 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.

Pandora's Star (Commonwealth Saga)
List Price: $49.99
Available from Amazon
Price: $34.99
Updated on 12-28-2008.