Pandora's Star

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Rafael Columbia [CS] Chief of the Intersolar Series Crimes Directorate, member of the Exo-Protectorate Council and a Halgarth family member. Becomes the Vice Admiral in charge of planetary defense when the Navy is formed and later the Admiral of the Navy Hoshe Finn [CS] Detective for the Darklake City Police working for the ice division/criminal investigation department Hamilton weaves several other stories into the main narrative of the Prime encounter. Among these is that of the ancient spacecraft Marie Celeste, found crashed on one of the Commonwealth planets, Far Away. An enigmatic figure, Bradley Johansson, claims the original passenger of the spacecraft is alive, an alien he calls the Starflyer. He claims that it is using mind-controlled agents to manipulate events in the Commonwealth, and that it caused the events that led to the discovery of the Primes. The Commonwealth forces dismiss Johansson as a crazy terrorist, and his attempts to interfere with the voyage to Dyson Alpha are thwarted. 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. This story has a huge amount of characters and I couldn't begin to list them all here but I will discuss some of the more important ones and those who I followed with interest. The first two characters, Ozzie and Orion, are my favourite from the entire book. These two become part of a big adventure following the 'paths' (an alien pathway between worlds and no-one really knows where they lead to). I genuinely found the mentor/mentee relationship here to be interesting and I liked the dynamic that the two of them found as the story went on and they found their rhythm. I also felt as though there was actually stuff happening in their story every time I was a part of it, and throughout the whole book their story was the only one which I consistently tuned into and found cool.

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'. Death World: A frozen wasteland where greenhouses barely sustain life, obscenely vicious natural predators, and people who are forced to live off the scraps the space elves leave behind. Eventually, the human forces decide that there can be no other solution to the conflict than to commit genocide and destroy the Primes entirely. However, it is revealed that the Primes are planning a much larger invasion, which humanity will be all but powerless to stop. 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 all the changes and undeniable improvements automation and consumerism had brought to the proletariat’s standard of living, it hadn’t changed the financial power structure that ruled the human race. A tiny minority controlled the wealth of hundreds of worlds, bypassing, buying, or corrupting governments to maintain their dominance. (795-6) There were a few good things and one of these which I did like was the modification ideas and rejuvenation. Within this Commonwealth people have the ability to live forever and become re-born every few decades if they have the money to pay for it. They upload their memories so that their newly made bodies can keep the memories, and they start living their life again maybe in a new job, area or with new friends, lovers etc. This idea was cool to me and made for some really old cool characters who had a wealth of knowledge. Orphan's Plot Trinket: The Silfen Friendship pendant given to Orion by his parents. Helps him and Ozzie out on the Silfen paths a few times by pointing them in the right direction. When astronomer Dudley Bose observes a star over a thousand light years away vanish, imprisoned inside a force field of immense size, the Commonwealth is anxious to discover what actually happened. As conventional wormholes can't reach that far, they must build the first faster-than-light starship. Captained by Wilson Kime, an ex-NASA astronaut a little too eager to relive his old glory days, the Second Chance sets off on its historic voyage of discovery. Emphasis on "seemingly" there - on a subsequent read-through it becomes apparent how many guns Chekhov left laying around.

These passages probably reveal more about Hamilton’s assessment of existing 21st-century human civilization than they do about what a 24th-century posthuman civilization would look like (if we can get there), but that’s not a criticism; the future’s inherent unpredictability usually ensures that science fiction is more about critiquing the present than describing what’s to come with much reliability. Hamilton’s preoccupation with this debate is engaging and useful despite its heavy-handed presentation.

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Everyone is different, but for me I also could not continue listening to this book. I listened to the preview and thought it was OK, but believe me after a while it is totally brain numbing. After capturing two crew members of the Second Chance (one of them Bose), MorningLightMountain discovers the location of the Commonwealth. Upon learning of the Commonwealth's existence, MorningLightMountain makes it its primary objective to destroy it. Having been in almost continual combat for its entire evolution, MorningLightMountain believes that it is necessary to eliminate all other life in the Universe to secure its survival into the distant future; it views all life that is not under its control as a potential threat. 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. Godwin's Law: Invoked when preparations for a Commonwealth Navy are deliberately modelled after the Third Reich's initial workaround of the treaty of Versailles.

Damn, that was a big tome. And as much as I like John Lee, I need a new reader in my next book. Between this and Revelation Space, I've heard John Lee's voice more this year than any member of my family's voice. My wife does say I can tune her out, and unfortunately I think this happened with Mr. Lee as well for large parts of the book. What about the internet? Here we have the Unisphere. Use your OC Tattoos to interface directly to information about nearly anything – directly into your brain. Don't want to concentrate to even do that? Well, you can offload this research to your personal assistant or e-butler. I enjoyed this book (which is part 1 of a 2 part story - see Judas Unchained for aprt 2) which takes place in the Commonwealth - a version of human kinds future where the stars are within reach via wormholes and you can, mostly, if you're reasonably careful, live forever!

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. Paula and Hoshe, meeting the Raiel and passing Tara‘s memories to Qatux. Another cool concept. Human ethics. Judging others through your own lens—should you or shouldn‘t you? Pandora's Star is a 2004 novel, written by Peter F. Hamilton. It is the first book in the Commonwealth Saga with its sequel, Judas Unchained.