I Read Books: Pandora's Star

Hamilton’s big space opera epic. And by epic I mean we get the full scale technothriller/soap opera multiple intersecting plot lines. We get a long build up in which we see what the various characters are doing before and during the starting event. We get multiple worlds, mostly variations on the bland, mature, corporate-dominated societies of the Commonwealth (each with a franchise of Bab’s Kebabs on the high street), which makes the weird places stand out. We get multiple alien species, most of them highly advanced but also acting almost orthogonally to human interests. And a slowly building threat that suddenly explodes.

It’s big is what I’m saying, and it uses all that page count, if not efficiently, then certainly to create an effect of weight to the proceedings.

The Commonwealth has life extension (via rejuvenation, which people fund through pensions), and interstellar transport via trains through wormholes. Yes trains, it’s fun. They deal with the problems that an immortal population controlling most of the corporations creates by having an expanding frontier to allow growth, opportunity, and places for people to get away.

There’s a pair of stars well beyond wormhole range that vanished from the visible spectrum, instead giving off infra red. They’ve been enclosed. It’s a curiosity. Then the light reaches astronomer Dudley Bose on the far side of the Commonwealth and he finds that it happens instantaneously.

For no very good reason everything aligns and the various politicians and other powers decide to build a ship to go there; this links into various conspiracies, some more plausible than others, all turning out to be, if not true, at least a distorted reflection of something that is going on. And of course things then go terribly wrong.

Read This: For a solid if long and convoluted space opera adventure
Don’t Read This: If this sounds like it goes on forever, and it’s part one of two so after a thousand pages you’re only half done, though at least you don’t have to wait a year for Judas Unchained like when it first came out. Grr.